Why Twitter is Important

What everybody in advertising, marketing and media should know about the technologies reshaping their business?  There has never been so much change in the way people communicate than there is right now. New generations use tools their parents don’t even understand, and young people consume news as easy as they create and publish it themselves. These shifts in communication are a primary reason why traditional advertising campaigns no longer perform the way they used to.

Twitter is one of the leading Web 2.0 applications reshaping the way we communicate.  Twitter is really a very simple concept which allows establishing relationships with other people and businesses that have created a free Twitter account.

Once a new account is created the owner is able to write 140 characters of text which will be sent to all of the people in which they have established relationships.  In the Twitter terminology, when you establish a relationship with another user, you are either following them, or being followed.   The 140 characters are called a tweet.  Users create the 140 character tweets, and the message is sent out over the twitter network to all users who are following you.  Likewise, you receive messages from all the people you are following.  The frequency of the messages depends on how much time and effort the author wishes to invest.  You can spend all day tweeting or you can send out sporadic once a month tweets.

That is really all there is to twitter. It is no great mystery, anyone and everyone is doing it.  The question for businesses is how this new technology affects my Brand.

Here at Bornge we created this short list of items to let clients think about how Twitter might be a good fit for their marketing strategy:

1. Twitter is Free!  You can use the service to reach 1000's of users without paying a cent.  Traditional media companies such as TV, Radio, Newspaper and Billboards can't compete with this cost structure.  Why pay for a printed newspaper ad when you can tweet for free?  In today's economic conditions free is always good.

2. People have made a conscious decision to follow you on twitter and have a vested interest in receiving communication targeted communication in the form of tweets.  Maybe you only have 5000 people following you on twitter, but each and every one of them has elected to establish a relationship with you.  Compare this to the shotgun approach of a newspaper ad where a business has no idea if a person has interest in a particular brand or product.

3. Twitter just signed deals with leading search engines such as Google and Microsoft's Bing to index tweets in a near real time fashion.  As soon as your tweet hits the streets, the search engines pick it up in their indexes.  This is great for link building which improves your page rank with the search engines as a quality inbound link.

4. No More Red Tape! Twitter will replace a lot of media outlets or at least steal a large portion of their business.  The speed and creativity Twitter provides for you to communicate with your customers in unprecedented. 

    

Twitter is Mainstream! It's gone Viral. It's Fun, New and exciting and allows users to utilize its power in their own way.  Stop for a moment today and think about all the people you know, friends, family and co-workers. These people are the extent of your circle of influence.  With a service like Twitter you can exponentially grow your circle of influence for free by attracting more people to your message.

Every company needs to embrace and leverage Twitter before Twitter replaces them.  Twitter is already said to be taking chunks out of dating sites, job boards, classified ads, social networking sites such as Facebook, search engines and much more.  Facebook knows Twitter is their biggest threat and it is carving out a strong hold as the most powerful real time search engine which Google cannot duplicate.