This week, I started using Twitter after almost a year long hiatus with a few attempts in between. And now, I’m absolutely hooked.
During my first class in the MCDM program, my professor encouraged us to play around with Twitter. As a long time social networking site user and a web 2.0 advocate, I’d self proclaimed myself as an early adopter to new tools and gadgets.
Boy, was I wrong.
It was difficult for me to understand why I would feel the need to update my exact whereabouts practically every minute of the day, especially when I already had a tool that worked just perfectly fine. I had been tailoring my Facebook updates to express my two cents to a closed group of social networks. Besides, status updates become more fun when you have an audience reading your daily rants and thoughts and commenting back with stamps of approval or comic relief.
Then, I discovered that Twitter is quite different than a just fancy version of Facebook status updates.
After two years since my Twitter introduction, I am finally jumping on the Twitter phenomenon. I don’t know how long it will last, but for now, I’m seeing the bigger picture that is social media. Social media is an online tool to help build relationships. Whether you are representing a business or yourself, you are walking on a two way street.
Many people rely on social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn to connect with other people. They utilize features on these sites such as status updates and news feeds to build personal and professional relationships. But these sites are limited to people connections. They provide a two way street for people like us who choose to be connected.
Alternatively, Twitter also provides a two way street, but it includes a connection between businesses and people. You choose to be connected, but it is not necessarily a connection validated by both parties. Anyone or any business with a Twitter account can instantly follow a user.
Witnessing the powerful effect of social media tools, businesses are often scratching their heads to come up with the latest and greatest way to “communicate” with their customers. They have experimented with blogs and uploads, but they can be timely and take up a lot of resources. Twitter is starting to break ground as a social media tool that connects businesses to consumers in a different way. It is different than blogs, articles, and Facebook fan pages, because Twitter is the real time transparency that consumers demand in their sub conscience. Marketers need to embrace the truth in that social media is not directly tied to ROI. It’s about building brand equity through critical mass. It is a long term strategy and not a shortcut to immediate monetary return. In my opinion, social media is best used as a complementary marketing tool, just as many brand oriented marketing campaigns support direct response advertising. Just my two cents.
Personally, Twitter is like using a 2.0 version of RSS feeds, because you’re not only receiving updates (“tweets”) but you are also contributing at the same time. It’s a conversation. It’s a two way street.
I started to follow news sites such as MSNBC, CNN, and New York Times on Twitter. That lead to following companies that I take interest with. Which eventually lead to following social groups like our MCDM program and the upcoming Super Bowl. Then, slowly (but surely) I broke out of my Twitter cocoon. I realized that, for me, Twitter is an optimal social network to update the world about my daily rants on digital media. It’s the first social networking site that I am not afraid of partaking in public (with no privacy features), because it is an environment where I want the world to hear what I have to say. Facebook wasn’t a great atmosphere for this for me. Twice, I tried linking my Twitter to FB status updates, and it hasn’t been a hit. But who knows, this could change as the way we interact with our online audience continues to evolve.
This so-called revelation of mine isn’t to say Twitter is the new grand solution for everything. Nor am I definite that Twitter has a promising future. But when a website is not monetizing and receives non-solicited bids up to $250M, you have to tilt your head and wonder what the hype is all about.
I still consider myself an early adopter for the most part, but I think it takes a couple of tries to make any new tool stick. Every effort can be a hit or miss when it comes to social media tools, such as networking sites, user generated content, and applications.
So haters, beware. I learned my lesson the hard way. Fad or no fad, you just may be missing out on the next big thing, because with social media, everything is inevitable. Give Twitter the benefit of doubt.
Another great article on embracing Twitter
Check out your Twitterholic Ranking!
TweetDeck: A very useful Twitter application
Follow me on Twitter
8 Comments
I have to say that Twitter is a great source for what I’ll call ‘breaking’ ideas or insights whether talking about a baby’s first steps or why digital media is breaking more new ground.
This summary recent survey about blogs in the business sphere points out that companies are still unsure about and or experimenting with Twitter.
http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.san&s=99389&Nid=51735&p=448066
Not to be the cynic, nor to invalidate your interest in twitter, but I’m not convinced by this. I’m not a hater, but I think the use-value of twitter in particular (and to some extent micro-blogging in general, though it’s harder to assess the latter in this context) is rather difficult to detail from this post. It sounds as if you’re saying: you decided twitter rocks because you made the antecedent decision to not be concerned about a) privacy features and b) because you think it best updates your “audience” as to your rants, which somehow begets an “optimal social network.” It seems to me that the more consistent interpretation of your remarks is that: you’ve realized that twitter isn’t precisely a social medium, but rather a mini-broadcast platform with incidental sociality attached to it, and that as a result you are less concerned about privacy (precisely because intuitively you realize that the social dimension doesn’t matter as much). Your use of the word “audience” seems illustrative in this regard. Of course, thinking of twitter this way may make more sense and isn’t really even at odds with your conclusion or your interest in it – I’m just suggesting maybe you’re sudden interest in twitter has more to do with your implicit understanding that twitter isn’t actually a social medium in any rigorous sense.
I suspect that if twitter was going to have staying power, or more accurately, if micro-blogging is going to have staying power and utility distinct from other forms of status update or thought disseminations, it would make more sense to link twitter/micro-blogging traffic to cluster data regarding topics among friends or other channels, with the interface looking more like an evolving and fluid tag cloud to which an input field is attached, rather than a feed. So again, you’re probably right that twitter is like rss 2.0, but that’s probably what limits its sociality and ultimately circumscribes its use-value.
s/was/is
I would like to admit that recently since I have a G1 phone I have been checking my Twitter alerts daily from a application called nano Twitter. The application simply send updates from everyone that I am following. The good thing about this is that I can read people, businesses or news updates from a simple scroll down and its all there for me to read.
I think that the use of this social media is good for brand building and also faster communication. The down fall is that something else will be next and we will continue to leave various digital footprints across the Internet world.
Alvin, good point, although the re is much interest in social media and especially Twitter for citizen communication and dialog for issues of concern. Good point of the simple ways in which you and others are receiving information from Twitter.
Just to point out – the link to ‘TweetDeck’ I provide at the end of my blog is an application that does link the traffic to organize data efficiently so that it isn’t just a constant feed. This is one of the few breaking ground applications that are starting to pop up, and I think they will help determine the success of Twitter in the long run.
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