A dozen different ways to the Twitter advantage
Social media and uses
Social networking has become the name-of-the-day today especially for the younger communities. However, one of the oldest and very popular social networking platforms – Twitter has a lot of following amongst successful people that include politicians, celebrities and even sportspeople. Twitter for average people and internet marketers is one of the easiest ways to reach out to a global audience and make oneself heard – loud and clear.
Although Twitter is already very popular, it is still growing by the day. It began as a small chat engine and has become today, what we call a virtual phenomenon. Celebrities and famous people use the medium to reach out to fans and followers while many others use it to showcase their services and products. Twitter, as a social medium has come to bring unforeseen advantages to many classes of people who use the internet.
What is Twitter?
Twitter is basically a service that can help anyone (member) to keep in touch with family and friends almost on a minute to minute basis. A tweet or an entry on Twitter can be something like “Just got back from school!” or even “Cooking broth and broccoli J”. Many people broadcast their daily tasks on Twitter and it is akin to SMS, only it is free to use. A point worth noting here is that Twitter can be used on mobile through a GPRS connection or even through the normal SMS service however, SMS tweeting is only available in a few select countries lie Canada, India and USA.
The dozen advantages of Twitter
The following are a dozen different ways that Twitter can help you.
Twitter for friends and families:
Family comes first, in the traditional sense or even in the virtual sense. Keeping track one’s family and friends is very easy on Twitter. In addition to keeping in touch, Twitter is a useful tool to make new friends and improve one’s personal network.
- Twitter helps keep track of one’s family and friends and their activities on a global basis. All that is required is a connection to the internet.
- This enhanced connectivity with friends and families helps keeps relationships better and greatly aids information sharing which otherwise would have been an expensive affair if phones were used for the same.
- Twitter brings families together in good and bad times making it easier to share laughs and cries.
- Basically Twitter is a tool that helps families and friends or even like-minded groups stand united, something like – All for one and one for all.
Twitter for webmasters and bloggers:
Webmasters and bloggers, in short internet businesspeople have a great need for social media since it can help them to interact with their clients and subscribers on a more casual level helping them to understand customer needs and preferences better. Twitter is the place to be for such businesspeople and being a popular social medium, Twitter gives them the advantage of addressing a much larger audience.
- Twitter opens a great information dissemination medium which helps webmasters to keep in touch and understand visitors and subscribers better aiding in development of better and innovative services.
- Webmasters can also use Twitter to offer real time support by using it as a chat medium with subscribers, visitors and customers. Being a unique social medium, Twitter also contributes greatly to generating repeat business for webmasters due to their prompt support.
- Twitter can be used for posting new announcements, comments and services by webmasters and can help generate a lot more traffic to the website or the blog.
- Twitter has many members from varied nationalities and races and can become a great medium for webmasters and bloggers to advertise their services and products to a global audience.
Twitter for institutions and groups:
Institutions and groups are basically a collection of like-minded individuals who are either fighting or supporting a cause where a cause could be a new service or a social phenomenon (For example, “SEO for a new website, how long?” or “Global Warming – The myth and the truth”). Garnering support for such causes is further easier if more information is available and as more ideas pour in from different people in different geographical areas. The socio-cultural inputs are also very important and Twitter is great medium to collect such information.
- Twitter can be great tool to conduct live seminars or conferences even if you are traveling. So, Twitter saves a lot of time and energy, not to mention the cost of conducting such an event.
- Information can be distributed on time and with precision using Twitter and one does not need to bother about checking email or phones not working.
- Regular interaction through Twitter would help keeping group or the institution members on their toes and would not need special pep-pills now and then. Twitter, with added social media can be a motivator in itself.
- Members of groups or institutions would end up knowing each other better by interacting through Twitter since conferences and meetings held are not impeded by black-ties and snooty-noses.
Now that we have seen the advantages of Twitter from various angles classified on purpose, there are some advantages of Twitter that are quite common and intellectual for everyone. Twitter tweets are idea generating for many people, especially for bloggers and webmasters, one can actually take an idea very far by working on them and broaden their intellectual horizons.
Tweets from friends and relatives are always a pleasure to read and this is what keeps Twitter going. The information shared is not only valuable but also fun to share and thus there is every reason why Twitter is growing by the day, literally.
One piece of advice though is that one should remember that all tweets are recorded, so be careful about what you write. There are evil-doers who may try and use your tweets against you. And, of course, there is no need to remind you that you should choose wisely when making friends.
Looking forward to your visit. I am officially on Twitter at http://Twitter.com/SonnyAhuja
Some interesting Twitter Statistics
# Since twitter is relatively new, over 72% of all new users on twitter have joined after January 2009.
# A large percentage of twitter users (>85%) post less than an update a day.
# About 20% of twitter users have not bothered to post a tweet yet.
# Over 93% of twitter users have less than 100 followers and almost 100% of all activity on twitter is done by about 5% of twitter users.
# Over 50% of tweets and updates come from mobile users and other twitter enabled devices and websites.
# Sex ratio on twitter is 53:47 (women:men)
# only 0.29% of twitter users follow over 2000 people and most of them are marketers.
The above statistics will show a miraculous change within a span of one year, since twitter is new, the data does not aptly describe the advantages that twitter offers.
