Heard the Buzz About Twitter?

If you haven’t heard the buzz about Twitter, you surely will in the next few months. Twitter takes the concept of ‘keep it simple’ to somewhat of an extreme, but in the process, creates a surprisingly useful tool for businesses and bloggers. The service works like this:

1. You sign up for an account
2. You start ‘following’ others, and they start following you
3. You ‘tweet’ out messages that must be under 140 characters long letting everyone who’s following you know what you’re doing

The useful part is all about how you use the service. Keeping your brand front and center, without being obtrusive, is a large part of successful branding. Twitter lets you update your followers quickly and efficiently about whatever you want, whenever you want. Their feed is pulling tweets in real time, so if you post a new blog entry, let everyone on Twitter know. If your company starts carrying a new product, hires an employee or plans to attend a networking event, tweet it. Your name (and logo) will start popping up in front of all of your fans, all the time. The more relevant your content, the better. The more often your content, the more active you seem. Twitter users are actually accustomed to a lot of tweets per user, so you’ll be less successful if you tweet less!

Once you start following others, you’ll spark all kinds of ideas and learn little tricks about how Twitter can boost your brand. You’ll also find that you have a much better idea about the people or companies you are following and vice versa. The newish phrase ‘ambient awareness’ describes this phenomenon of subconsciously getting to know someone by reading the insignificant updates in their lives. You get to know their interests, like, dislikes, etc. from a collection of seemingly unimportant details over time. Let your followers get to know you! Soon you’ll see your name coming up with @ in front of it in your feeds. This is a Twitter-specific indication that someone is talking to or about you. Dive in further by searching Twitter at http://search.twitter.com (and soon directly from your profile). Large companies are setting up multiple Twitter accounts, each focused on different aspects of their business, to keep people up to date. Searching for your company also gives you a chance to see what people are saying about you and even a chance to respond. Google is trying to buy Twitter’s search engine, because the real-time information is turning out to be a serious trend predicter and an efficient internet search tool. You can learn a lot from its results.

Twitter’s homepage
http://www.twitter.com

Tips on using Twitter for your business… these will make a lot of sense after you play around in Twitter for a while
http://www.macworld.com/article/140254/2009/05/twitterdos.html

The White House on Twitter!
http://twitter.com/whitehouse

Oprah on Twitter!
http://twitter.com/oprah

Mark Cuban on Twitter!
http://twitter.com/mcuban

This blog on Twitter!
http://twitter.com/webrolik

Me on Twitter!
http://twitter.com/drewbrolik

A look at the future of the Twitter search
http://mashable.com/2009/05/07/twitter-search-real/