What’s the big deal with twitter?
I wrote earlier in the week about crowdsourcing and why the topic is worthy of your interest. In this post I’ll describe why social media deserves your attention too. Here in the UK, Twitter penetration has exploded from an inner circle of early adopters into the popular mainstream in less than 12 months. In the process clients and friends often ask me to explain ‘the whole Twitter thing’ and what it means to them. So let me use Twitter as an example to highlight some of the exciting trends and opportunities in the social media space, as by now I have a bit of practice.
The simplicity of Twitter makes it hard to understand its success. At a glance the site simply lets you tell people what you’re up to at any given moment — via cellphone, instant messenger, or the Web. Which sounds clever, but not earth shattering right? Even founder Biz Stone once admitted that on the surface the idea seems like the “simplest and stupidest idea in the world” to most people.
Before anything else, Twitter was a messaging service, originally described as microblogging. You can share a 140 character message with your followers and they can share messages with you. If you catch yourself reviewing and commenting on items in your friend feed / status update stream on Facebook, then you’re a good way to understanding the social networking appeal of Twitter.
Early on, Twitter’s twist was their SMS syndication, which started as a fun way to SMS all your friends at once, but has since grown to open up lots of uses. Like sports cancellations – you can create an account for your cricket team and get everyone to follow you. If it rains on match day you can let everyone know instantly, using a single SMS.
Then more and more celebrities started using Twitter to share messages and connect with fans. High profile bloggers were the first, but entertainers, comedians, sports stars and musicians have since jumped on the band wagon, introducing Twitter to large non techie mainstream audiences.
As the popularity of the platform has spread, and messages are public and searchable, Twitter has become a source of breaking news. News about political victories, protests, scandals, natural disasters and tragedies is available on Twitter long before mainstream media. In recognition of this Twitter has added trending topics and real time search capabilities to the platform. It’s become an alternative to Google and the destination to find real time information. Searches on Twitter reveal a snapshot of what the world is talking about at that very moment in time.
For businesses this has created a huge opportunity – a completely new channel for promotion, PR and market research. A simple keyword search can instantly reveal the continuum of opinions and attitudes your customers hold in regard to your brand, products and services. You can find and talk to your customers faster and quicker than ever before – giving a personal voice to your company and helping you to understand what you’re doing well and where you can improve.
What’s more, Twitter expose a suite of data services over an API – a technical interface that allows externally developed applications to access the vast amount of conversations and status updates going on within the platform, in real-time. This has attracted a swarm of talented developers fighting to come up with the next leading communications tools, news breaking services, market research applications and more.
So Twitter now has a lot of uses. Its popularity can’t be explained by a single feature anymore, but requires an understanding of the new ways users are using the platform. And for each new use of the platform, Twitter’s growth curve gets steeper and steeper.
