Do you ‘tweet’?
06.27.08
by: Jennifer Marshall

My quest to be an online diva begs the constant need to research and explore online social networking trends. Having a strong hold on LinkedIn, Myspace, Facebook, Friendster, ZoomInfo, Jigsaw, eBlogger, and other social tools can become a full-time job.

Jumping on the bandwagon yet again, I recently signed up for a Twitter profile. If you ‘tweet’ as well, let’s ‘follow’ each other. If this last sentence left you confused, you’re not alone.

Twitter, Inc., a spin-off company of San Francisco-headquartered Obvious, was born in March of 2006. It was recently speculated that Twitter has 1+ million world wide users per month and on average users send 15 Twitter messages a day.

How does it work?

Twitter allows authors to broadcast a group text message from mobile phones, instant messaging services or Twitter.com. In other words, this informal truncated blog (limited to 140 characters per post) has been described by Time magazine as ‘microblogging’ or ‘blogging for regular people’.

To further investigate, I established a profile on Twitter and commenced research. Who is on this thing? What do they write about? What is the greater social power of this site?

Not necessarily a scientific method, I chose to click at random on profiles and highlight a few of the most interesting profiles out of my ‘focus group’.

Experiences from my first ‘tweet’:

1. http://twitter.com/chartier: Has over 1,181 followers and follows 203 fellow tweets. He is a writer and uses Twitter to review ads, products and TV shows.
   • This site could be good for demographic social clustering – what types of video games, TV shows, products, etc. does someone like ‘Chartier’ follow and what can this tell me as a marketer?
2. http://twitter.com/panache: I clicked on ‘panache’ because he had a comic book style image of himself. He follows 343 people, has 672 following him and has posted 8,763 posts! Wow! His posts on June 22nd focused on buying a car and he elicited feedback from his social network.
   • I am amazed by the quantity of responses his network of ‘friends’ replied within hours. This site could be a powerful tool for branding, obtaining brand feedback, generating buzz about products, and informally surveying / brainstorming.
3. http://explore.twitter.com/Maggie: Maggie is out of San Francisco and an author. She has a whopping 5,335 followers and follows a measly 77 individuals. She must have something insightful to say – most recent posts discuss her swelling left eyelid, partners getting married at SF city hall, and contemplating the powder on Cool Ranch Doritos.
   • In a post on 5/7 she comments that a person at a café is twittering next to her – turns out it is one of her Twitter followers. Creepy.
4. http://twitter.com/andrewbaron: Attempted to sell his Twitter profile on Ebay at an opening bid over $1,000.
   • Similar to buying lists in direct mail campaigns.

Beyond fellow average joes twittering, the social power of this tool is just beginning to be uncovered:

• Obama has the #3 top Twitter audience size with 41,060 followers.
• NASA twitters about Mars. Really? NASA?
• Reports suggest Twitter users were the first to break the news about recent earthquake in China.

With more than half adults utilizing social platforms as a way to interact and 10% adults blogging (up from 5% last year), it is undeniable that businesses should take note of up-and-coming platforms like Twitter. The question is how…

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