What's Twitter and Who's Twittering?

The micro blogging social media site Twitter is fast to use and very responsive. No long articles with 500 words to post here!

Just 2 lines to say what you are doing, reading, promoting or thinking.

Twitter is a quick way to link to any page in any niche you want to promote. Its a fast way to share a video you liked or an article you found helpful without writing a long post about it.

More than anything else though it's a way to gain a fast group following and link a feed to a blog or social site and vice versa.

You can converse with people on Twitter. You can private message your followers. You can say something or nothing. You can eavesdrop on other people's conversations.

What's Twitter? One of the most unassuming and useful tools around so far as social media sites is concerned.

How to Use Twitter Video

Watch this short video guide to Twitter about who is twittering or tweeting on Twitter and why.

The first following 2 articles give some valuable advice on how to use Twitter as a tool rather than getting sucked into the vortex of time consuming non productive chatter (or tweeting) . And if you think Twitter is a waste of time read the last one as well, these are stats that may well surprise you.

Twitter is probably the number one tool in your social media toolbox. learn how to use Twitter, don't just join the site and wonder why.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Is Twitter Noise or a Valid Business Tool? (socialmediatoday.com)
• 10 Steps to Encouraging Your Customers to Become Evangelists (kylelacy.com)
• Facebook and Twitter Lead the Pack as Social Media Usage Skyrockets (mashable.com)

This slideshow by Jeremiah Owyang focuses on planning a web media strategy for 2010.

The main four points it makes are to

• Listen to your clients

1. If you are not listening - you don't know what customers want so you won't know where they are looking for it or how to position yourself with web media so they find your business web pages.
2. If you are not listening - a swag of negative comments may be posted on the web without your knowledge
3. If you are not listening - you miss out on the intelligence you need to develop new products for them

• Provide systems to help them

Help desk software is a valuable tool for online complaints that is private to you and the customer but enables you to keep a record of the complaint and resolve it quickly and to the satisfaction of the customer. If customers have no private means of complaints they will take it public!

• Provide discussion areas for them

Forums and blogs and social media pages can all be places where other community members can help your customers by advising people how to use things and giving other valuable information. People can comment and ask questions and generally this helps them to feel connected to your company.

• Employ a person or team of people just for this
  

To keep up with the web based systems, depending on the size of your company and the amount of traffic you get - you are going to need staff!

Start training your people now to handle these systems so you are not caught out later trying to catch up and unable to tell the difference between an expert and amateur. Social marketing training is a big topic, every site is different and has things to learn.

The technology is the easy part, it's there now and can be used as is. Education systems can't keep up! It's the people with the "know how" who are in scarce supply.

Related articles by Zemanta

• People Don't Scale. How Does That Affect Social Media? (businesspundit.com)
• The Inside Word: Social Media Is Losing Its Authenticity (paidcontent.org)
• Web Strategy Survey (slideshare.net)
• Conversation Intelligence: Top Social Media Marketers (ecairn.com)
• The growth of twitter (with analysts) (thecustomercollective.com)