2008: The Year of Twitter
2007 was the year of Facebook. According to people count statistics of compete.com, Twitter has registered a 1200% growth over the last 12 months compared to 119% increase for Facebook. While people are getting fed up with Facebook zombies and hugs, some have started realizing the value of Twitter.
Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lilbear/206262544/
Twitter is a one-to-many communication medium. People call it a micro-blogging tool because you can publish your mundane daily activities using 140 characters or less. You express your thoughts and actions and broadcast them using Twitter.
At first, it seems very childish. You may be wondering, “how can I express my thoughts and actions in only 140 characters? Why people will like to read my mundane daily activities? And what value does it provide to my readers?”
Check out how Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama is broadcasting all the meeting schedules, caucus and primary results, informational and inspirational messages for volunteers to take actions.
If you are a blogger, you can tell your Twitter followers using some teasing information about an upcoming blog article before you publish it on your blog. This will create anticipation and desires.
If you are selling something on the web, you can use Twitter to publish hot sales for your Twitter followers. This will give you an idea which poroducts are hot sellers so that you can stock them before you announce the sale to everybody using other medium.
You can publish cool tricks and tips that you just read in a blog about personal development, productivity improvement, money saving ideas, etc. to your Twitter followers.
You can run a quick survey by asking a short question.
You can follow thought leaders, industry luminaries, artists, athletes and other interesting people in Twitter to gain insights on diverse topics.
For right now, I am using Twitter to follow Barack Obama. If you are not careful, Twitter can be a huge time waster.
Caroline has published an authoritative Twitter Guide. It is pretty large but very thorough.
