What is Twitter? (Twitter Guide Part #1)

This post is part 1 of  the Big Juicy Twitter Guide. Don’t forget to follow Caroline on Twitter.

Why You Must Start Using Twitter Right Now

Let me cut to the chase – Twitter is many things to many people but what often goes unnoticed is that it can be an incredibly powerful marketing & community building tool with the ability to develop your brand, build relationships with your audience and provide a promotional medium that has the ability to go viral!

In this guide I have tried to present a complete picture of Twitter and show techniques / tools / guidelines for Twitter usage for all kinds of people. However this is a blog about Internet marketing so I do have certain bias towards using Twitter for marketing purposes. If you are really serious about using Twitter for your marketing purposes then I can highly recommend the Twitter Rockstar course which teaches you how to dominate your niche using Twitter.

What is Twitter

According to the Twitter FAQ, “Twitter is for staying in touch and keeping up with friends no matter where you are or what you’re doing.” That doesn’t really tell us very much. Wikipedia says, “Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send updates via SMS, instant messaging, email, to the Twitter website, or any one of the multitude of Twitter applications now available”.

Twitter asks the question, “What are you doing?” and allows you to send a small update (limited to just 140 characters) to your followers. The concept is amazingly simple and that is perhaps one of the main reasons why it has caught on like wildfire. The restriction to 140 characters has resulted in Twitter being labeled “micro blogging”. A traditional blog is a log of what somebody is up to, but in a richer, more detailed format. One of the key benefits of Twitter is that you can send and receive updates (also called tweets) via your browser, email , instant messaging clients and SMS so you can keep in touch no matter where you are.

What’s the Point?

I first encountered Twitter at least a year ago. I loaded it up and watched the activity on the main Twitter page. All I saw was a seemingly pointless stream of tweets that literally documented every movement of people’s daily lives down to the unnecessary detail of what they were eating for dinner! I tried sending a few updates but nobody was following me so I was just talking to myself. I played with it for a couple of hours and then ignored it for a year or so.

Twitter is now being recognised as a valuable marketing tool and I’ll explain why in the upcoming sections of the guide. But here’s the thing – you don’t have to listen to the incoming noise! You can ignore it if you choose to. Unlike email, Twitter is just ‘fly on the wall’ communication. On the other hand, if you have people following you, you hope they are listening so you can get your message across.

Ideally, you keep the people you are following to a minimum, and have more people following you.

Twitter is a Broadcasting Service

Email, Instant Messaging and SMS are all direct messaging systems. You choose the person with whom you would like to communicate and you send them a direct message. Blogs are open broadcasting systems. When I publish a blog post, it will go directly to those people who have subscribed to the RSS feed but it is also available publicly. Twitter is rather like blogging with just an RSS feed. Consider this diagram:

We have two people, Bob and Betty. Bob can follow Betty, Betty can follow Bob and if they both did that they would be following each other. That is literally all there is to the relationships between people in Twitter. It’s extremely simple and what it produces is a situation like this:

Every time you send out a tweet, all your followers will see it. Unlike blogs, Twitter is a real time broadcasting medium. You update, it is broadcast to your followers, and then it is largely forgotten (but not quite!) When you first join Twitter you have no followers and you are not following anybody else so it can seem pretty lonely. I think this one of the reasons that some people just “don’t get it” when they first start.

However, there is much more to it than that! There are now many tools and other web applications that will integrate with Twitter allowing you to broadcast your tweets all over the web even without followers. I’ll show you how to do that later in the guide.

Twitter is a Mobile Communication Tool

After you join Twitter you have the option to link it to your mobile phone and / or to your instant messaging clients. By having Twitter accessible on your phone you can both send and receive updates which means that you can stay in touch wherever you are so it is a truly mobile communication tool. This can be a pretty powerful thing.

This post is part 1 of  the Big Juicy Twitter Guide. If you really want to take your Twitter marketing to the next level, check out Twitter Rockstar. Also, don’t forget to follow Caroline on Twitter and you might also like to check out the Twitter FAQ.

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