Are You “Tweetarded?”

As you can probably guess by the title I have been asked to research the new form of social networking formed around Twitter.  I will try to answer a few basic what, where, why, and how questions but I also want to get a little deeper into the whole Twitter phenomenon.

 Here is a synopsis of Wikipedia’s definition of Twitter.  Twitter was created by Jack Dorsey in 2006 and quickly gained notability and popularity worldwide.  Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read messages now known as tweets. Users can send and receive tweets using the Twitter website, Short Message Service(SMS) or external applications.  Twitter is a free service where users can tweet text based posts of up to 140 characters to any of their followers.

To have a 140 character limit message and a link to a website, a user will need to use a URL shortening service such as tinyurl, bit.ly, and tr.im, and content hosting services such as Twitpic and NotePub to accomodate multimedia longer than 140 characters. 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. What we have to do is deliver to people the best and freshest most relevant information possible. Twitter is an information network that tells people what they care about as it is happening in the world.  When you go to post a comment in the box it says ” What are you doing” right next to it.

I attempted to shrink a URLthat I had from a business that I was involved in and here are the results from Tinyurl.com

TinyURL

was

created!

The following URL:

http://www.exfuze.com/blast

has a length of 27 characters and resulted in the following TinyURL which has a length of 26 characters:

http://tinyurl.com/y8e4odc
[Open in new window]

Or, give your recipients confidence with a preview TinyURL:

http://preview.tinyurl.com/y8e4odc
[Open in new window]

Yes, you see the incredible shrinking power:  it went from 27 characters, all the way down to a tiny 26 characters.

 I know its Mind Blowing!!!!!

The truth is that it was very easy to shrink my URLwith Tinyurl.com.  I just entered my URL into the box and out came my smaller url.   I think that the concept is good and maybe sometimes the outcome would be smaller than that.  I have seen many URL’s that are much smaller on Twitter.

 Here is a quick video that explains Twitter called “Twitter in plain English.”

So far my Twitter experience has been interesting.  I agreed to follow the people in the sign up area that it recommended for me and somehow I have followed some pretty strange people.  I have football players, rock stars, porn stars, professional businessmen and average everyday people.  I am still trying to grasp the concept of how to do a search on twitter that actually gives me the results that I am looking for.  I you watched the short video above you would see that the basic concept of Twitter is to let friends know the mundane things that you do everyday.  I think that would bore most people enough that they would quit. I guess that’s why only 40% or so on average maintain their Twitter accounts out of the millions signed up.

I am so bored with this subject right now and fighting to stay interested enough to break through the nonsense and find some useful reason to Tweet.  I will keep going for the sake of Twitter.

In  my search to find something useful about Twitter I found many why not to Tweet videos.  I have to display one to be fair to both sides.  Here is the video titled Why Twitter Sucks!  This video does have many solid points about why Twitter is a wast of time.  I will warn you that it does use some semi- harsh language towards the end of the video.

Now that I found the negative video I figured that I had to give a positive video to equal things out. This video is entitled 10 reasons that Twitter is great for business.  In the video he describes 10 reasons that Twitter is great for business.  I have a few of them that I will write down for you readers.

1. Positioning your brands.
2. Real time search.
3. Advertise podcast links and drive traffic to your site.
4. Improving customer service.
5. Communicating with your market or marketplace.
6. Increase sales by running Twitter only deals.
7. Helps to connect you to leaders in the marketplace.

I know that I was long-winded as usual but I felt that I had to try to give both the good and bad sides of Twitter.  I am sorry to say that Twitter hasn’t grown on me like the other subjects that I have studied but I am told that it will.  Do we really need to know for example what a friend or co-worker is having for lunch?  No probably not!  I do think that if we can tap into the positive networking and word of mouth aspects of Twitter then we can find it just useful enough to sift through all of the “bulltwit” that comes with it.

As always I am interested in your thoughts and comments on the subject.

 

Advertisement