Using Twitter For Marketing Part 1: Intro
Intermittently, over the period of a few posts, I'm going to address the potential of using Twitter for social media marketing. I intend to pick up and extend some of the existing ideas I've found around the blogosphere, as well as (hopefully) bringing a few new ideas to the twitter table. Needless to say, it's still very early days for this kind of social media marketing, so I'm sure ideas will emerge on twitter as I blog and twitter during the time.
As you can tell, I'm one of the people who find the Twitter phenomenon intriguing, and I do see a lot of potential and value in it (and other services like it). I do realise that there are many people who don't share my enthusiasm. I do encourage you to leave comments in either case.
A quick Twitter recap (but more than 140 characters):
It has been said that Twitter reached a tipping point at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas this year, and that "the buzz has now seeped from the blogosphere to more traditional print media". Newsweek has indeed reported on it, and more recently the The New Your Times has run a story. Incidently, The New York Times has also started to twitter.
Not surprisingly, Twitter currently has a big following among bloggers and people actively engaged in social media. This is no doubt due to the immediacy of live, group communication, and the opportunities it allows for directing people to other content. It's clear that Twitter is growing in popularity, but it remains to be seen whether it reaches a tipping point as far as mainstream popularity is concerned.
Twitter allows a great opportunity for groups of people to share experiences in real time. Tweets are also archived in individual profiles, and individual tweets can be found using Google. As I see it, these features offer quite a few opportunities for social media marketing...
5 comments:
Hey JJ,
Try Jaiku.com as well and perhaps incorporate a comparison of the two services in your series. Why?
Jaiku extends microblogging with the ability to start conversations from each blog post and comment on posts from friends. You can also include personal webfeeds (Twitter, FlickR, Del.icio.us, your personal blog, etc.) as part of your online presence. Those unique features are included in every Jaiku account.
I'm in marketing and PR and I just started working with Jaiku in the U.S. Many of our fellow bloggers have been taking a similar approach by looking at both services. So I hope you check it out, sign on to Jaiku.com, as well, and perhaps link to me (Vineberg) as a contact.
I look forward to reading your piece.
Cheers
Neil
which one of these 2.0 companies has a shot?
http://www.congoo.com
http://www.stubleupon.com
http://www.twitter.com
Which one holds the most value for you?
JJ,
I (like you) am very interested to see where the twitter style of communication technology may take us. My partner and I are in the process of developing social sites for very specific vertical markets and we can really see the benefit for this style of communication in them. We also have a slight twist on it not so much from the communication standpoint but from an advertising standpoint. We are hopeful this new approach will work as we've invested much time, effort and resources.
I look forward to your article.
Best,
Brian
JJ,
I guess this form of marketing works. I would probably never have found your blog without it.
Twitter is so random, I've been getting Twitters that are both laugh outloud funny (Henry Rollins complaining about his coffee)and insightful (people working on books yet to be published).
@Neil, I'll give Jaiku a try too.
EC:/>
Thanks for your interest.
Yes, I will try Jaiku. I know that it is certainly catching on too, and it does seem to have some great features. Twitter, Jaiku and Tumblr seem to be the big 3 causing a buzz at the moment, and all seem interesting in their own way.
I think I'll just focus on Twitter for this though, as I don't want to make it a comparison of the different services at this stage (maybe later). I think a comparison would be a different article and I know quite a few others are covering that right now. Obviously, much of what I discuss could well apply to other services though. I've been using Twitter quite a lot, and at the moment I think Twitter is the most popular, so I'll focus on that for the time being.
Richard, I think that Congoo, Stubleupon and twitter are quite different, and I don't want to try and predict the future either. There are so many variables and anything can happen. Look at what has happened with Dodgeball for instance. Google bought it, and now the founders have left Google dissatisfied with the lack of support it has been given since - so as I said, it's early days and anything could happen.
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