Using Twitter

Using Twitter

There’s no doubt about it: Twitter has created quite a stir and currently it’s one of the fastest growing social platforms with a huge increase in the number of visitors per day.

But what exactly is Twitter?

Well, simply put it, Twitter is a social networking website that allows you to follow people you’re interested in and find out what they’re doing. When you follow people, your homepage will display updates about what they’re up to, reading, creating…you name it.

Twitter is starting to be used by marketers worldwide as a way to easily send updates to their prospects & customers, as eventually users spend more time checking updates than they do reading their e-mails.

The cool thing about using Twitter is that all posts must be 140 characters or less. This is an attempt to come close to normal human conversation – less useless details but straight to the point.

As a social media micro blogging platform, using Twitter offers the business enterprise an array of interesting potential usage. Whether or not the future of corporate micro-blogging will be based on Twitter or another company that replaces Twitter as the prevailing platform (remember WordPerfect?), remains to be seen. Other micro-blogging companies currently available include Jaiku and FriendFeed.

Next, who can use Twitter beneficially?

1. Online businesses
Once you have created a loyal community of followers on Twitter, you will want to start leveraging them. You can start tweeting about your blog, company or anything you are involved in. Your followers will then start re-tweeting your tweets, bringing more traffic to your website! For example, Dell Computer has successfully leveraged Twitter to drive sales to its outlet website.

2. Journalists
Twitter is a great way to spread breaking news very quickly and easily. CNN’s Breaking News is already posted on Twitter. It’s all part of the wider move of journalism to becoming more connected with readers.

3. Teachers/Educators
Teachers and educators can access a stream of links, ideas, opinion and resources within seconds from a selection of global professionals. It’s now possible to actively compare what is happening in schools in your county with others on different continents. Twitter is a great medium for sharing ideas and getting instant feedback.

4. Artists/Creative People
Create a dialogue with your audience. Twitter works very well for the creative community including artists. You can use Twitter to help encourage people to visit your blog or your website, promote your work and your activity.

5. Politicians
Using Twitter as a political tool to communicate with people.

6. Sports organizations
Sports organizations can ask questions, get instant feedback from fans, plus save money on focus groups. It’s easy to spread the news and extend sponsor promotions.

7. Customer Support
Twitter is an amazing way to manage customer service and support by providing a channel that is continuously monitored and replied to quickly.

In short, Twitter can be used by anyone who wishes to:
–    Keep track of breaking news
–    Monitor their reputation
–    Get quick answers
–    Stay in touch
–    Meet new people
–    “Be” in several places at once
–    Build their authority as an expert
–    Share their knowledge

Learn more about using Twitter at www.twitter.com

What is Online Social Networking?

What is Online Social Networking?

Let’s face it, the Internet has forever changed the way we live and it has become an integral part of our lives.

Instant Messaging, Voice over IP and Portals have become critical to life & business – a whole lot of us would have a hard time surviving without the Internet and a whole more could not imagine life without online social networking.

Today, you commonly hear phrases such as “Hey, check out my Facebook”, or, “Connect with me on LinkedIn” or “I will tweet you”. I can understand Facebook, Linkedin and the others, but I must admit that I am intrigued by “Tweet” and “Twitter”.

Online social networking is based on the use of specialized websites, aptly called social networking websites that allow you to directly or indirectly connect with individuals of your choice for various purposes. The purpose is to build online communities of people that share common interests or activities, or people that are interested in learning about the interests and activities of others.

The sheer beauty of online social networking is that it allows you to keep in touch with your contacts across the entire world – there are no limits to the number of friends you can have and they can be located anywhere as long as they have access to the Internet.

The concept is simple. You are either are invited to join a social network website or you join it on your own and you then search for your contacts and then invite them to become part of your network or you get invited to join your contacts’ networks. You interact with your contacts and continually grow your network by adding more and more contacts. The main purpose is to share all sorts of information within the network and keep each other informed about your activities, events and in general, life. You can share photos and videos, messages, updates, events and scores of other things.

One word of advice – be careful of who you connect with and how much information you share with them – protect your identity at all times and be sensible about your activity.

Benefits of Social Networking

Benefits of Social Networking

One of the best ways to brand yourself and let people know who you are and what you’re doing is by joining online social networks like MySpace, FaceBook, LinkedIn, Digg, Reddit, Orkut or Twitter. Today, social networking is one of the fastest growing, not to mention free means to reach your audience. And we’re not just talking about business people who know their way into online social networking to build and promote their businesses, but there are also artists and politicians (like Barack Obama’s social networking ambitions) that are using these online communities to reach their audiences. With the use of the Web 2.0 platform and the ability to upload a wide range of file formats and convert your materials to mp3s and podcasts you can reach your target audience far more rapidly than ever before.

Here is a quick look at some of the benefits of social networking.

Social Networking Is Good For You

The concept of electronic social networking isn’t really a breakthrough of the 21st century. It has been around since the 1990s and it is the dramatic improvements and innovation to previous networking services that helped along services such MySpace to rapidly become a global phenomenon. The year of 2004 brought the launch of the all-time favorite Facebook, the creation of Harvard Graduate, Mark Zuckerberg. This networking site was instantly gaining popularity thanks to the incorporation of externally developed add-on applications, which in turn enabled the graphing of a user’s own social network, thus linking social networks and social networking.

Because of our busy routines – by the way, when was the last time you sent a hand-written letter? – social network websites have become the foundation on which we build and maintain relationships with friends, family and even clients. The online communities are where we go to meet new people, explore our interests and activities and share all sorts of information, in other words, stay in touch with everything that’s shaking in the world. Basically, what social networking really means is grouping people or organizations with specific profiles and interests together. While many social networking websites are focusing on specific interests, there are others that don’t. Social communities without a specific focus on certain topics of interest are known as “general” social networking websites and they usually have open memberships, meaning that anyone can become a member, no matter what their interests or beliefs are. But once you become part of this online community, you will start creating your own network of friends and you can select the people you want to connect to, based on your hobbies, preferences and common interests.

The new social networking players, including Cisco, the leading supplier of networking equipment and network management, and a multitude of other start-ups like Ning consider that social networks will soon be as ever-present as the rest of the websites. They are starting to create tools that allow people, big companies and even politicians create their social websites especially customized for their own clients, friends, fans and partners. It’s not that the existing social networks aren’t great, but they tend to put their users in a rather limited space, by being somewhat restrictive about what they can and can’t do and they were not designed to be flexible. These social networking sites don’t really let people build and customize their own worlds as they please – which is the nature of what people want to do online anyway.

It’s possible that of all services in the new social spectrum, the social networking sites are more promising. Maybe the reason for this is that these community-driven sites have the ability to introduce their user base to other social web services. Just think about it, Facebook is also a photo-sharing service, MySpace also offers music sharing and LinkedIn is also a search engine for jobs. MySpace stays on top of them, but Orkut is rapidly coming from behind and Facebook is doing great. An interesting thing to watch is whether LinkedIn intends to expand its user base and broaden the offer. Right now, TagWorld doesn’t look very good, while Bebo isn’t all that strong, as it has been recently portrayed. The veteran Friendster network is not out of the game yet and it seems to be doing just fine. Anyways, it seems very clear that the battle for the winning places (MySpace, Orkut) is going to heat up, which can only mean bringing more diverse offers and services for the users.