Using Twitter Part One. Whats it all about?

So what is twitter all about? Simply put Twitter is social networking tool. In 140 characters you can post little snippets about your life, what you are doing, where you are or even what you had for breakfast.

2 years ago it was just another micro blogging service, a fun, but irrelevant tool mainly used by computer geeks (like me). Nobody could have predicted its growing popularity and the massive success of Twitter has now made it an exceptional marketing tool.

Anybody that uses Facebook will be familiar with the status update feature. This is essentially what Twitter is with one fundamental difference….

When you add people as friends to your page on facebook they also have to add you as their friend. Therefore only allowing people you have agreed to see your status updates, this is a symmetric relationship model. Twitter on the other hand, uses an asymmetric relationship model. You can ‘follow’ somebody on twitter without them having to ‘follow’ you back. This allows for four types of relationship….

1. People who follow you but you don’t follow back
2. People who don’t follow you, but you follow
3. You both follow each other
4. Neither of you follow each other

This relationship model is what makes twitter such an exceptional tool. Because people don’t have to follow you, its up to you to create a relationship with other twitterers (I will go over a few ways you can do this in the next article). Over the last 6 months or so, there has been a significant increase in Shropshire businesses that have now adopted twitter into their marketing strategy. Used correctly, it can increase traffic to your site, promote new products for sale, encourage people to signup for your enews, complete mini polls to gain more information about target markets, demographics etc and much much more.

This is the first part of an ongoing series of blog posts about the importance of social marketing, if you have had any any experience (good or bad) please tell us about it.