Twitter

Expect the unexpected. Even the best plans cannot anticipate everything that might happen, so you have to improvise as you go forward. And one such improvisation is Twitter. When you wrote your Marketing Plan, maybe Twitter did not exist but it does now. Twitter started in 2006 and according to Wikipedia 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 itself costs nothing to use, accessing it through SMS may incur phone service provider fees.

The 140-character limit on message length was initially set for compatibility with SMS messaging, and has brought to the web the kind of shorthand notation and slang commonly used in SMS messages. The 140 character limit has also spurred the usage of URL shortening services such as tinyurl, bit.ly and tr.im, and content hosting services, such as Twitpic and NotePub to accommodate multimedia content and text longer than 140 characters. Since its creation, Twitter has gained notability and popularity worldwide.

Now for some stats:
•According to a recent report on Pew Internet “the median age of a Twitter user is 31, which has remained stable over the past year. The median age for MySpace is now 26, down from 27 in May 2008, and the median age for LinkedIn is now 39, down from 40. Facebook, however, is graying a bit: the median age for this social network site is now 33, up from 26 in May 2008.”

•According to a recent study by Business.com of 1900 social media professionals:
◦65% have less than 2 years of experience working with social media.
◦ The companies represented by these professionals are just as new to the ballgame with 71% having less than 2 years of experience with Social Media.
◦In 66% of these companies the marketing department leads the social media efforts.
◦In 23% of these companies the customer service department leads the social media efforts.

Twitter is a great way to develop relationships and promote yourself and your product or business. But it's important to avoid being seen as someone who just promotes themselves. Most of your tweets should be about helping others, but you also need to inject some personality to help people get to know you.

Here's a great blogger who offers tips about Twitter:

http://johnfmoore.wordpress.com/2009/11/15/your-2010-social-media-plan-making-140-characters-count/

Here are some ideas for tweeting:

1. Link to helpful or entertaining articles, Web sites, and blog posts and recommend products and services you find useful.

2. Offer an incentive to subscribe to your ezine or blog, or offer a free eBook or sample of one of your products with no strings attached.

3. Announce your live and virtual events.

4. Teach a mini-lesson in 140 characters.

5. If you make a mistake say so.

6. Get to know your followers.

7) Twitter is as a "knowledge network". A "network" of people to whom you can pose questions and - usually extremely rapidly - get back responses.

8) Conduct a survey.

9) Twitter as a Travelogue, plane late? traffic? Check it all out on Twitter.

10) Use Twitter as a tool to drive traffic to blog entries.

One final note. If you have actually read this far along (thank you, if you have!), you might have come to the conclusion that I spend a lot of time using Twitter. The truth is that I really don't, but I have found a way that works very well for me to fit occasional glances at the twitterstream into my regular daily workflow.