Online Marketing • Social Media

Tweet Your Way to the Top

posted by Jon Tingley @ June 25th, 2008

You may have heard about a crazy new thing called Twitter lately. The truth is, it’s not that new, and it’s not that crazy. Twitter was launched almost two years ago in July and has since gained almost 2 million users worldwide. The number of Twitter users is constantly growing, as is the sites popularity; around 2 million tweets are sent each day.

What is Twitter? Well, as confusing as it sounds, the idea behind the service is very simple. The service is based on the question “What are you doing now?” and from that, you can communicate your own or your business’s status to the world. Twitter was created as a cross-platform tool to communicate your status to friends. All you have to do is create an account, find some people to follow, find some people to follow you, and start tweeting. The beauty of it all is that your followers can choose how they would like to receive your updates, either by text message, instant message, or on the web. You can also update your status from your mobile phone, instant messenger, on the website, or through the multitude of applications and plug-ins that have been created just to tweet.

What can this do for you? Twitter may have been intended for individual use, but it hasn’t taken long for a few enterprising minds to think of ways to use this in business and political settings.

Tony Hsieh, the CEO of shoe retailer Zappos.com, uses Twitter daily as a way to connect to employees and customers. Hsieh has even gone so far as to create Twitter classes for his employees to encourage them to use the service. Hsieh attests that the tweets coming out of Zappos has created better morale internally and better customer service externally. He says, “For customers, I think it’s a way to get a glimpse of what our people are like and what our culture is like.” Check out their site here.

I use Twitter at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Union Recreation Center. For us, Twitter is a fantastic way to connect to college-aged youth and send them updates about our hours, special events, and promotions. Paired with other social media, Twitter has become a powerful marketing tool in getting instant results from our customers. Depending on the number of followers we have, I could send a text message to Twitter and instantly thousands of students are alerted in several different ways about the event that’s going on in the Rec Center. Check out the Rec Center’s site here.

Similarly, Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton and John McCain have all embraced the service as a way to recruit and communicate with America’s youth. While it has been successful for two of them, Obama is leading with nearly 42,000 people following him over Clinton’s 4,142 and McCain’s 68. What’s interesting about Obama’s use is that not only does he have thousands of followers, but he is also following over 43,000 people; imagine the tweets he gets. Click the links for their pages. Obama. Clinton. McCain.

The bottom line is that we are living in an age where information is updated and disbursed every second. For businesses to succeed, they will have to figure out how to keep up. Will Twitter be the way?