The last example talked about how Zappos, the online retalier, uses twitter to reach out to its customers. So the questions is would it make sense for your company?

What is twitter  ? ( for those of you who haven’t been caught up in this craze ).

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers who are known as followers. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications. While the service cost nothing to use, accessing it through SMS may incur phone service provider fees.

Since its creation in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Twitter has gained notability and popularity worldwide. It is sometimes described as the “SMS of the Internet”^[3] since the use of Twitter’s application programming interface for sending and receiving short text messages by other applications often eclipses the direct use of Twitter. - Wikipedia

Tweeting is a rather new concept for a lot of people most of whom can’t wrap their head around the concept of sending “thoughts” out on a random basis. It’s facing the very same barriers that blogs faced when corporates first started evaluating them, primarily the question of “how on earth do we use this effectively”?

So why tweet?

Well,  its a great way of connecting with people. However you need to understand the traditional “targetting” methods do not apply as the way you “get” followers is very arbitrary.

It’s probably the wrong medium to use if you want to share large volumes of information but great if you want to send a constant stream of “thoughts” out and get feedback from those following you.

So, before you go anywhere you need to first identify what business problem you’d like it to address. If the medium doesn’t make sense there is no point in wasting time pursuing this direction of thought.Establishing a presence via social medium takes a lot of effort and if you intend to use it as a platform to drive future initiatives a lot of thought has to go into the final solution.

This is meant to engage individuals not large organizations and while some companies do have twitter accounts setup the focus again is to connect with individual users across the web.

Create an account at twitter and play around with it for a while, it is a little confusing initially ( the benefit ) but you’ll eventually get the hang of it.

You can follow me on twitter as well..

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