5 Great Reasons To Twitter.
January 12, 2009 by Lisa Oshima | Social MediaTonight I caught up with a mobile industry colleague who asked me why he should bother with Twitter when he already has a blog and Facebook account. Here’s my reply:
Twitter is so easy, fast and rewarding that I’ve stopped blogging as much in favor of Twittering more. Twitter is is a micro-blogging platform (i.e. 140 characters or less of text). It now feeds all of my Facebook updates. Here are the reasons why I think you’ll like it:
- It’s fast and easy to get started and update – 10 seconds a crack (max) Twitter is the latest land grab, so I’ve taken the liberty of signing you up for an account (so that no one claims your name). Email to you forthcoming. Your password is ******. At least you’ll have the real estate if you decide to try it.
- Twitter is growing very fast (~2.5M users worldwide), and there’s an active community. Here are the stats & demographics from Quantcast: http://www.quantcast.com/twitter.com.
- You get breaking news faster than anywhere else on the web. It’s a great way to keep up with and spread the latest news in tech and mobile.
- You can monitor and mitigate what people think of a particular brand People are talking about brands all the time on Twitter. In the mobile industry, for example, here are the conversations going on about Nokia: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=nokia.
- There’s a great mobile and tech conversations on Twitter… Twitter provides you with a quick and easy way to start a conversation with people and brands you find interesting and stay in touch with folks you already know offline. Here are a handful of the folks that I’m following in the mobile and tech arena with names you might recognize.
- Tim O’Reilly: Founder of O’Reilly Media: http://twitter.com/timoreilly
- TechCrunch: http://twitter.com/TechCrunch
- Robert Scoble: http://twitter.com/Scobleizer
- MOTODEV (Motorola’s developer community): http://twitter.com/motodev
- Kara Swisher (Boomtown blog): http://twitter.com/karaswisher
- Pete Cashmore (Mashable blog): http://twitter.com/mashable
- Jeremiah Owyang (Senior Analyst of Social Computing at Forester Research): http://twitter.com/jowyang
- Facebook: http://twitter.com/facebook
- Dave Morin (Facebook Platform): http://twitter.com/davemorin
- Mario Sundar (Evangelist for LInkedIn): http://twitter.com/mariosundar
- Loic LeMeur (Founder of Seesmic): http://twitter.com/loic
- MG Seigler (Venture Beat): http://twitter.com/parislemon
- TED (updates about the TED conference): http://twitter.com/tedtalks
- Guy Kawasaki: http://twitter.com/guykawasaki
- Jerry Rocha: Social media and mobile guy at Neilsen: http://twitter.com/jerryrocha
- And so many more! If you sign up and want other recommendations, start following “mrtweet” and go to http://www.mrtweet.net/, which will feed you recommendations based on your interests/who you follow.
Give it a try, and follow me on Twitter.
3 Responses to “5 Great Reasons To Twitter.”
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I read your post about 5 Great Reasons to Use Twitter, and it made me wonder…
Being that there's of course a massive herd mentality online (as in the real world), do you think you could just stick some random person in the middle of that list and they'd suddenly be swarmed with followers for no reason other than someone they were on that list?
Personally, I went through and looked at each of them and decided whether or not I'd get anything out of following them, but I'm guessing there are massive numbers of people who don't do that.
I suppose this is just an extension of “if it's on the internet it must be true”. It just seems like everyone and their brother on Twitter is some kind of self-proclaimed social media expert, doesn't it?
Anyway, thanks for listening – am interested in your opinion.
I agree, Seth. There are a lot of people on line who just follow the herd. However, the really smart people take a similar approach to you, considering someone else's opinion before deciding whether or not it resonates with them. Just because someone says something on the Internet doesn't mean its true.
And, you're right – there a lot of self-proclaimed “social media experts” on Twitter (and the Internet as a whole). In such a rapidly evolving field that is still very experimental, it's hard to believe how many people call themselves a “expert”. Just because you understand what social media is (i.e. you've written a blog, posted to Facebook, or used Twitter) doesn't mean that you're an expert. (Knowing how to use a pencil doesn't make you an artist!) Social media is an art and a science, and we're all still trying to figure out what works and why.
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