Reading through the class blogroll, I came across Katie’s post on Twitter, which was really insightful and did a good job at showcasing the broader picture of what Twitter is. Twitter’s microblogging platform and social networking allows people to share and view updates, as they happen, with their followers. Many people have become tired of and annoyed by mindless tweets, (like what you ate for lunch or what you bought at the mall!) but there are many people, organizations and media outlets who tweet important and relevant information worth following and paying attention to.
The bigger picture is that twitter is a valuable source of social media marketing, messaging, engagement and branding. Twitter also allows you to keep in touch with all of your friends and many organizations are coordinating fundraisers, contests and events via twitter. Twitter is one of the fastest platforms for mass real time updating and messaging and twitterfeed enables users to send blogs and RSS feeds. The nature of the game is that you sometimes have to sort through or just ignore pointless tweets. The tradeoff being that followers have access to quickly connect to the masses, especially with all the new applications that are out there for mobile devices.
A great example of how powerful twitter has become is to look at the recent presidential elections and how effectively is was used by the Obama team or just look at some Fortune 500’s, most of them are using twitter and reaping the benefits of social marketing and consumer engagement.
Bing added Twitter to its search engine and recently Google stated that it had reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in their search results, which I think means that Twitter is here to stay, for at least a little bit longer.
I came across an article in Time magazine entitled; 10 Ways Twitter Will Change American Business. The article states that “Twitter will probably evolve into both a community of individuals and a community of companies that provides goods and services,” and it’s going to be really interesting to see just how Twitter will continue to develop and be used in the near future. I’m including the list from article below.
Profitable Microblogging
“10 ways in which Twitter will permanently change American business within the next two to three years, based on an examination of Twitter’s model, the way that corporations and small businesses are currently using the service and some of the logical extensions of how companies will use Twitter in the future.”
- The Future of Twitter
- Hyper-Local Marketing
- Making Old-World Advertising Work
- Turning Wall Street on Its Head
- Making Blogs Count
- New Ways to Get Consumer Data
- Helping TV and Print
- Expanding the Power of Micropayments
- Changing Telecommunications
- A New Way for the Government to Reach You
- Charity Begins Online
*Source: Time Magazine
This is a video of author Clay Shirky giving a presentation on “How Cellphones, Twitter, Facebook Can Make History” at TED.
Worth checking out!
