If you’re finding yourself confused with Twitter, you’re not alone. It’s easily the most polarised social platform. Some love it and others hate it. Some describe it as confusing and others say it’s simple. There’s no denying the popularity of the site. Twitter is currently the fifth highest rated website in the United States by Quantcast.com. Google, Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo and Amazon top that list.
Although Twitter doesn’t release statistics like Facebook does, it is confirmed that there are well over 200 million registered users on the platform and 500,000 new accounts are created every day. Twitter users generate a massive 140 million Tweets each day.
What is Twitter?
Twitter is a social network site where users ‘tweet’ an answer to the question, “What’s Happening?” in under 140 characters – similar to a status update on Facebook. Twitter has become an amazing tool for companies who previously couldn’t afford exposure to thousands of people. Twitter is not just used by businesses for promotion and broadcasting, more importantly it is a great listening tool. By listening to other people and interacting with them — rather than simply broadcasting tweets — is what makes Twitter a valuable tool to spread your businesses message and connect with a wider audience.
How does Twitter work?
Instead of ‘fans’ your business will have ‘followers’, and in turn you will also follow many other business and individuals. Anyone can follow anyone as there is no privacy involved on Twitter, unless you specifically check the ‘Protect my Tweets’ box in your settings page. And anyone can Unfollow just as easily – many people will automatically stop following people that are inactive users or if they do not follow back within x amount of days, as the aim of Twitter is to build up a quality, active network.
When someone is following you, your ‘tweets’ will show up in their newsfeed. However, due to the sheer volume of tweets, if you only ‘tweet’ a few times a week, it is unlikely that many people will read your message here. It will likely get quickly lost in the constantly changing newsfeed. However if someone clicks on your profile, they will be able to see a history of all your tweets.
The other method people can read your Tweets is through Twitter’s search engine http://search.twitter.com . This function clearly distinguishes Twitter from Facebook, in that people can search keyword tweets for not only your followers and the people you follow, but the whole Twitter community!! For example, a tourist who arrives in Queenstown may search the term ‘Queenstown’ and ‘coffee’ for research on anyone having tweeted about a good place to go. Similarly, they may tweet “I’m in Queenstown, where is a good place for coffee?”. If your business is monitoring Twitter through daily searches, you could respond to that person directly and recommend somewhere (perhaps your own business). So each tweet you send is a keyword targeted message to not only your network, but also the 200 million Twitter community.
Twitter hashtags (#) are another feature unique to Twitter. They are a way of classifying the subject of your tweet. In a way, hashtags allow you to create communities of people interested in the same topic by making it easier for them to find and share info related to it. Some common hashtags used in New Zealand are #nzwine (NZ wine community) and #eqnz (NZ earthquake chat). Most towns also have a hashtag, if yours does not, why not start one?
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This post is a sample chapter from our eBook: Get Your Social Media Marketing Sorted!
