The Twitter phenomenon

It’s in the media, your friend might have mentioned it or you might even be considering joining. It’s Twitter and it’s the next big buzz in social media communication.

Twitter is essentially a messaging service that lets users communicate messages no longer then 140 characters to a list of “followers” who might be associates, friends or colleagues. Twitter calls messages “tweets” and every time you write a message displays this on your Twitter profile page and your friends news feed.

Twitter is no technical revolution, the concept is quite simple but extremely powerful when used right. Picture this - your business is accommodation, you have frequent visitors to your hotels around the country and collect user information for marketing purposes. What if your hotel had it’s own Twitter account and you encouraged visitors of the hotel to “follow you” on Twitter for special discounts, promotions and updates. At the touch of a button you could easily communicate with people interested in your business.

To put my theory to the test I recently put the power of my own Twitter account to the test by sending out updates about new web sites we had launched. To my surprise, a large number of referral visitors in our Google Analytics data came from my very own Twitter account on the first day the web site was launched.

Twitter might be the latest buzz topic, but don’t look past social media for its marketing applications. Heck, you might actually find you enjoy the odd tweet or two.