Does Twitter really matter?

To Tweet, or not to Tweet? I'm still trying to figure this out myself. I am experimenting with it, and you can check out my page here.

What the hell is it?
Its a form of "micro blogging", that you do from a phone or PC. "Micro" because you can only use 140 characters to reply to the question "What are you doing now?". You sign up to then have the "tweets" of people you follow sent to your own personal page.

In just over a month, 45 people have signed up to mine. Still a long way to go to reach the 1.46 million who follow Obama! The Top 100 Twitterers are here. Some are people. Others are brands.

Does anyone use it?

Oh yes. Twitter had 32 million users in April 2009. What is mind boggling is the growth rate, shown below (Twitter is the dark blue line). This was up from 19million in March! It has more users than the New York Times online and LinkedIn.

What I don't get is that some people follow literally thousands of Twitter sites. I was chuffed that Marketing Magazine were following me, until I found they do this with over 4,000 sites. This means they get probably 4,000+ Tweets a day coming in. So I guess they don't read them, unless they have a full-time person trawling the comments?

The risk of Twitter being a fad that people don't keep using is backed up by analysis showing that the retention of users is much lower than for Facebook.

Does it matter for brands?
I think the jury is out on this. But, I have found some good examples of brands using it well. Here are examples from Search Engine Journal. Click here to check out the sites themselves.

Use 1: To update customers of the company deals and coupon codes:

DellOutlet posts recent refurbished Dell computer offers. The company estimates they have made several million pounds out of it according to Sky News.

2. To offer an alternative customer support option:

ComCast offers a friendly Twitter customer support; what I personally like about their profile is the real person photo instead of the company logo.

3. To get closer to customers:

Via their Twitter profile Southwest Airlines run non-official, entertaining discussions with their customers.

3. To react to customers’ feedback:

Popeyes answers their clients’ feedback in an entertaining tone and also updates their Twitter listeners of the current deals and discounts.

4. To offer an alternative subscription option:

ATTNews updates their Twitter-followers of the news published at the site.

5. To post company news:

Samsung has created a Twitter account dedicated to mobile phones and posts both the company (US department) and product news there.

6.To promote the corporate blog:

Kodak Chief Blogger both posts the company blog updates and discusses them with the company customers.

Comments

[Rocky]

, Walid K.Sharabati, John T. Rigsby in Classification and Data Analysis, Macerata, Italy: EUMEdizoniUniversite0 di Macerata, 245-248, 2007179. “Style of author-coauthor soacil networks,” with Yasmin H. Said, Walid K. Sharabati,John T. Rigsby, Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, 52, 2177-2184, 2008;doi:10.1016/j.csda.2007.07.021, 2007 (title: sic)Said mentions getting (good) invitations to speak at The Annapolis Center and George C. Marshall Institute, but I am not sure they actually went. And as of her , she claimed to be under contract to write a book.And Wegman actually did write a book, of which I hope DC will tell us the details, since I do not have a copy of this rare item.

[isabel marant outlet]

I wonder how you got so good. This is really a fascinating blog, lots of stuff that I can Get into. One thing I just want to say is that your Blog is so perfect!

[Rack-Mount Monitor]

Twitter and Facebook certainly are similar from a feed perspective, but that is about all. It provides real time, instant access to celebrities, breaking news, events and actual corporations – including high-ranking officials.

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Yes Twitter matters for our small business this is great news article. Thanks for replying to my comments.

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We really appreciated this timely article as the content is great, thanks again.

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Twitter actually helped promote our company by adding promotions. We think it matters.

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I am also benefiting from Twitter and I agree that though sometimes some updates are unnecessary, it is still a big help to promote a company.

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The risk of Twitter being a fad that people don't keep using is backed up by analysis showing that the retention of users is much lower than for Facebook.

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nothing in twitter really matter, it's only the triumph of fragmentary communication.

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yes it does sometimes.

[Marie Amour]

wow...I didn't know there are so many people on twitter! It seems that is getting seriously big!