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9 reasons Twitter will be around for awhile

Saturday, June 6th, 2009

I believe that Twitter will stand tall and be able to weather the storm of any potential competition from future interactive web applications/search technologies such as Google Wave, Bing, and others. Here’s why:

1) EASY TO USE / SIMPLICITY OF FORMAT
“So easy, even a CELEBRITY can do it!” (haha)

2) PEOPLE LIKE IT
There just seems to be something about that 140 character status update box! In spite of the fact that it can often be challenging to squeeze all you want to say in one post of that length, there’s just something really cool about the quick, communicative aspects of Twitter that people really like (and the effect that celebrities like Oprah Winfrey and Asthon Kutcher have had by using Twitter has been, in my opinion, more of a good thing then bad, in terms of spreading its popularity and attracting more users).

3) INTEGRATION WITH OTHER PLATFORMS
Many Twitter users have, for example, already set up Twitter/Facebook integration (you can choose to have all your Twitter status updates also be used as your Facebook updates), make Twitter status updates via SMS text on your mobile phone, and use a wide range of third party-developed apps like Tweety, Tweet Deck and several others to manage tweets from people you follow. Popular free, open-source Web publishing platform WordPress offers several apps (called “plugins”) developed by third-party users that allow WordPress publishers to do such things as: tweet their latest posts, make posts of their latest tweets, show Twitter feeds in various kinds of ways, etc. And in the future, even if platforms such as Google Wave become the absolute “tidal wave” that some predict, Twitter should be able to be used in conjunction with them, much as it does with other web publishing software already (you may have noticed, if you watched the Google Wave video clip introducing some of the upcoming new features of Google Wave, that the developers clearly showed an example of the incorporation of Twitter embedded in Wave ;) .

4) SIZE OF NETWORK
There are millions of dedicated Twitter users worldwide sending over 3 million messages a day, with more and more people setting up new Twitter accounts every day!

5) MEANS OF QUICK INSTANT COMMUNICATION W. USERS WORLDWIDE
Ever do a search on a term you are interested in, and see the results/latest comments on that particular topic by users that look interesting? Ever watch the latest tweets made by all of the users you are currently following when you click on the ‘Home’ link, maybe click on the Twitter profile of someone referenced in a RT or #followfriday? You probably have, and you should if you want to maximize the benefits of using Twitter!

6) MEANS OF BLASTING OUT QUICK NEWS/EVENT ALERTS OR PRODUCT UPDATES IN REAL TIME!
You may already know of the success that companies like Dell, Zappos, Jet Blue, restaurants, and others have had by making quick “blast-style” tweets on their latest products, specials, and other late-breaking news. It is actually a big, essential, money-making tool for several key businesses, and something you can use to catapult the success of your website or business as well ;) .

7) ALTERNATE BOOKMARKING METHOD
One of the reasons I use Twitter is so I will have a link to an article, tutorial, or other item that I think is important saved in my ‘Updates’! That way, Twitter can be used as a way to save bookmarked web pages.

8] SOURCE OF QUALIFIED IMPORTANT INFORMATION
You’ve probably already no doubt found some potentially amazing articles referenced by one of the top Twitterers that you are following, or by clicking on a RT from someone THEY are following eh. Of course in the end, with information seeking and sorting, it all comes down to a process of “separating the wheat from the chaff,” but Twitter helps you to sort out, what in your opinion, will be more of the “wheat”! ;) (Another thing I just thought of here, although of course you can use Twitter for marketing purposes, the platform seems to have a built in structuring for keeping the “signal-to-noise” ratio pretty high, cutting down on the noise. If you see a user for example, who has post after post of primarily crap tweets like “Get rich now in 5 minutes!” or spammy type contents, you can simply not follow that person, or unfollow them if they start to do this.

9) NETWORKING OPPORTUNITIES
Although this should be readily apparent, Twitter has HUGE potential for you to build up your networking contacts: people you might consider collaborating with on projects (or at least who you’d want to have in your network, so THEY can maybe recommend someone to you, etc), potential customers, clients, or employees (there seems to be a growing number of Twitter-based job directories and posting for all kinds of fields).

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Ultimate Guide to Using Twitter

Thursday, May 21st, 2009

[Before I begin, I do want to point out that most, if not all of this post, may not come as that much of a surprise to you if you are more of a "seasoned, savvy, social media geek," but even so, hopefully this article will provide (or at least reinforce) some good ideas and things to keep in mind regarding using Twitter! Please share any comments you may have below, and thanks for reading!]

1) Provide consistently relevant and useful tweets (of course, you are human, and it’s good to even “show you are human” sometimes and post non-usual, hyper-utilitarian type tweets from time to time, but keep those to a minimum (at least if you have more “professional goals” for your twitter account. My suggestion would be to, if you want to make more personal-oriented type tweets to set up a personal twitter account for that).


2) I like to check the most recent page of the user’s tweets for relevance, if you don’t see something that looks useful to you personally in the first (most recent) page of their tweets, then why would you want to follow that person?


3) Check the user’s link ;) Worth it isn’t it to see if their content is actually something you’re going to want to be following??


4) Be on the lookout for “spammy-looking” posts on their ‘Updates’ list (personally, I won’t follow someone with repeated tweets, i.e. the user making the same tweet on the page more than once, long list of @this and @thats, etc).


5) This is maybe one of the most, if not the most important thing to do to get top quality linkups on Twitter: look at the friend lists of the top people you most admire, and see who THEY are following, and follow them ;) .


6) I kind of don’t like to say this in a way, but of course it would make sense that if you do follow people who have a massive number of followers, your chances of gaining new followers yourself would be higher. [On a related note I will say that, although I have not yet tried those "get 5,000 followers in 5 mins" sites, I suppose they do work, but my assumption would be that, in order for them to work, you must have to let the service provider have you automatically follow random people, so, regardless, is something you'd really want to do?]

There are other tips and tricks to to get more followers, but really I would say” “QUALITY OVER QUANTITY,” and I would tend to shy away from “get more followers now” things, in the same way that I shy away from the multitude of those “get rich quick,” “make money working from home” etc claims. I really don’t think it is worth TOO much time going overboard to try to get a massive number of new followers on Twitter; a much better philosophy I would say would be to focus on continually providing quality content, messages, and overall communication stemming from your website or business, and gain more followers who you would actually want to talk with or with whom you could form truly potentially valuable partnerships! ;)


7) Follow back those peeps who are following you whom you think are relevant! The reason for this would be three-fold: first, it is a kind of courtesy thing to return the favor for the fact that they followed you. Secondly, if these people found you on their own, if you follow them, there is a good chance that more of THEIR friends might be potential followers of you, and even more importantly, potential QUALITY CONTACTS! And last but not least, it will save you time looking for quality people to follow huh! :p

*One more point on the subject of “Twitter etiquette? “twittiquette? is that too far with the geekery? haha. CITE YOUR SOURCES! Both in retweets (“RE @personwhopostedthisarticle”) and web site name/url that originally published the article, whenever you can fit them within the 140 character allotment.


8] Post more tweets.
Just like a regular website, TV show, magazine, or news publication, the more content you can provide readers (and potential readers) – and the more often you update – the greater the chance will be that your posts will actually get read, and read by a wider audience (just please don’t spam, for the sake of all of us! Quality & extremely busy netizens have a low tolerance for spam :-) ,


9) If you are on the fence about whether to follow someone or not, just follow or don’t follow!
You can always “unfollow” the person later if you like, right?!

Last thing I want to point out, remember that Twitter (at least for now, unless it goes on to take over the entire Internet as a whole, which would seem pretty unlikely!) is only one potential channel of communication for your social network building. Remember that there are still MILLIONS of users on a bevvy of other social network sites (Digg, Flickr, MySpace, Facebook, all the rest), and that sites like MySpace, though a lot of geeks are stating it is done for, still has huge potential (obviously) especially for those of us working within the music, arts, and entertainment fieds.

OK well hope that can provide you with a little bit of my own personal insight, please share any comments you have below, and good luck and wishes to you all! :-) .

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