For those that aren’t aware, Twitter is a social network that allows ‘friends’ to communicate with each other in brief 140 character bursts of text (known as tweets). You can send these tweets directly through the twitter website, or through one of many twitter applications (such as the desktop based twhirl, or the Blackberry based Twitterberry).

It doesn’t sound too tempting does it? Personally I put off joining it for quite a while, not wanting to have to decipher the “WOT RU Doing?” and “I Dunt no u?”s of the world.

But then I actually tried it, and I found that it was actually a good communication tool. People talk in full English, and hold conversations that are interesting and, because of the tool, interactive. Obviously there are some people out there that try to take advantage of the tool to try and spam or over push their services / sites / products, but you’ll get that with most media, so it’s not unexpected.

But how can twitter help your business?

• It can group people interested in your company, products, or cause together, helping them communicate, and enabling them to work together to spread the message about you.
• It can help you to broadcast news and events about your company to subscribers, showing that there’s a ‘beyond P.O.S.’ side to your firm.
• It can help you to know what’s going on with your users, giving them the ability to give you feedback as to what they like / don’t like, and what they feel your company can do better. Although if you’d prefer to lurk rather than engage, twitter has a search function (formerly known as Summize)that you can use to search all twitter conversations for a mention of your company / product / etc.

So should Twitter be a part of your social media strategy? Well, as is the usual theme with these social media sites, you need to have time set aside to build up and maintain an account, so just signing up, and adding a bunch of friends, then not doing much won’t work. You have to tweet, and interact with other people, answering their tweets. Eventually you’ll build up an account that can serve you and your organization well.

Oh, and if you’re interested in following the tweets of the Serengeti Team, you can do so at https://twitter.com/endlessplain.

Filed under: Social Marketing on Monday, July 21st, 2008 by Simon Heseltine |
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