What is Twitter?

An overused term these days as people strive to get a grip of on-line marketing is “social networking”. Many people understand that friends meet up and chat on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, but they do not really understand how signing up to Twitter can progress their on-line marketing.

Twitter is a relatively recent player in the social networking arena but to appreciate how it can help with search engine marketing it is important to understand exactly the answer to the question, what is Twitter?

Twitter is a means for one person to communicate a brief message to hundreds, thousands, even millions of followers and followers of followers. It is clever micro-blogging i.e. an on-going diary that answers the question “what are you doing?” The messages contain a maximum of one hundred and forty characters and are called tweets and they are sent out to friends who are called followers.

The restriction in the length of messages is the appeal of Twitter for businesses as on-line marketing messages have to be pithy and to the point. Messages are sent from the Twitter website as a form of SMS. Messages can also be sent from third-party websites such as Twitterfox, Twirl and Snitter.

Every time a tweet goes out it lands on the Twitter homepages of the sender’s followers. It’s ideal for businesses that want to publicise breaking news. Of course, all the followers have followers so once a Tweet has gone out it can spread faster than a bushfire in Australia. Demi Moore sent tweets to her followers about Susan Boyle and within minutes You Tube was receiving thousands and then millions of hits to see SuBo on ‘Britain’s Got Talent’.

Setting up an account with Twitter makes good on-line marketing sense for both individuals and companies. It is also a useful way to contact people for some direct on-line marketing.