It seems that every blogger has the inevitable twitter entry.
You know, the one where they talk about how helpful twitter is for their business and marketing strategies! This could be “that” article, but instead I’m going to describe how I utilize twitter in my every day life.
So twitter is a microblogging service with an open API. Effectively, it’s a lot like a facebook status except much simpler. You can follow people, and you’ll get a huge timeline of all their messages. Originally, it was a simple live-blogging mechanism people would use commonly to say what they were doing at that exact moment. “Sitting on the toilet,” “About to cook lasagna”, and stuff like that. There’s still a lot of regular people, CEOs, and celebrities just posting their day-to-day routines. It’s a very slice of life atmosphere even still, for the most part.
However, the twitterverse has grown since those days. The API was made public, and then developers started to make their own programs centered around the basic twitter functions. So you can mass message and reach LOTS of people using twitter. So you’ll see lots of marketers who think they’re getting the word out, by having thousands of automated followers, and all that stuff.
I think it’s really great way to socialize, meet new people, and get yourself out there. Furthermore, twitter seems like it’s being taken advantage of. Imagine it’s prom night, and your date is a little drunk. You slowly attempt to put your hand up her skirt, and she LETS you. That’s what twitter is becoming.
I want to meet real people on twitter. I don’t go there for people to cop a feel on me. It’s a great service, but I think sometimes it’s a little misguided. I love reading links, hearing about people’s day and all that, but sometimes it just feels like a huge infomercial and all that. I’ve met so many wonderful new people on twitter. How many people have I met on facebook? None. I usually know them before hand. How many people have I met on myspace? Ok, a couple…but that’s because that’s where I market my music. Everyone knows Myspace is a place for friends music.
While twitter is pretty simple, there are some good websites that I find pretty useful to go along with your twitter account. Tweet Manager is pretty good for all sorts of things. Whether you want to mass DM people, link your blog to your twitter, have auto-away messages, or auto-follow people — it’s all there. It’s a really nice tool to help you meet the people you want to meet, and automatically have you blog content posted to your twitter. I also tend to get good use out of Matt, which allows me to post the same message from multiple accounts. I have a few different twitter accounts. One for myself, one for Tokyo-Nights, and one for my now-defunct podcast. It really helps when you have different feeds, and you don’t feel like logging in every single time.
If you do happen to be a marketer of some kind, there are even automated ads you can put up on twitter. It’s called magpie, and it’s actually somewhat controversial. I’ve seen quite a few times when people will stop receiving your updates simply because you allow magpie to send ads through your account. It works just like every other ad service. Except, it’s not really click-based, it’s followers-based. The more followers you have, the more each ad is worth. People pump money into the magpie system to advertise their products, and then people allow those ads to show up as tweets (the twitter messages) on their page. I can understand the frustration. You go there to meet people, not to meet advertisements.
In general, it’s a pretty nice community. There’s lots of cool things going on. Sometimes you can browser search.twitter and find out information about events being gathered in your area, or just find who’s talking about your favorite actor. There’s awesome stuff like tweetbomb which is an organized “bombing” of someone’s twitter page. Tweetbomb chooses one of its followers (who willingly subjects himself to the bombing by adding tweetbomb) and effectively bombs them with several thousand @replys and follows. It’s sort of meant to shower a random individual with an astounding amount of messages and a lot of new followers. It seems to have worked with most people who have been “victims”. There’s also twittitt which is a google custom search webpage designed to have a similar graphical interface to twitter. So while it uses actual google search, it brings the simplicity of the twitter interface to you. There’s also 3 Twitterers of the Day, which is always a nice touch.
So yeah, I think twitter is a good place to reach people. If you want to make friends it’s great. If you need to market a product, it can work for that too (when used correctly). Should it be the only place? No! Of course not! No one website/interface/thing is going to be the true path to your path to social media solutions. But twitter sure helps!
