Kathy Smith’s Blog and Your Gateway to Success

What is Twitter

Twitter has two purposes. It can be used just to keep in touch with friends or families or it can be used to help your business.

Basically, Twitter is like micro blogging or even think of it as sending a quick IM, (instant messaging) but you’re able to see all the updates (known as tweets) which are text based and have up to 140 characters in length.

For those of you who are asking what is twitter, you may not take it seriously at first. That would be a big mistake for many reasons. First, you may be surprised at the number of high profile people you have access to and can keep up to date on the latest news. Someone who I admire greatly in the network marketing field sent me an update welcoming me and yet he’s never answered any of my emails and I’ve had access to him and some great information.

According to the State of the Twittersphere report, each day 5 to 10 thousand new people join Twitter. Current estimates of total users top out around 5 million. That’s a lot of opportunity.

Second, for those of you who are seeing this as just another social networking tool and continue to ask, ok, I get it, but what is twitter? Twitter allows you to post updates as often as you want (again – limited to 140 characters). You can follow people and people can follow you. When they follow you, they see your updates (otherwise know in the twitter world as “tweets”).

Basically, it’s a constant flow of communication. Now for those of you who are overwhelmed as it is with the contact access and flow of communication available with our current technology, you’ll be happy to know that you can turn it on and off as often as you like. And you can also search through Twitter because they keep a public record of all updates so you’re not going to miss anything.

So what is twitter and how can it be used if I have a business? (Because for the social aspect, it’s very clear that it’s a great tool to keep everyone updated on what you’re doing). Duct Tape Marketing founder John Jantsch identified 3 big advantages of Twitter. From getting insight to the questions asked to traffic and people can spread your thoughts to new places.

Your tweets can become viral and more people can find out about you.

Let’s say you have a product and you want to find out what others think about it. You can search Twitter and see the responses. Bestselling author David Meerman Scott said, “I have personally connected with hundreds of people I otherwise wouldn’t have, and I booked an interview on NPR and a big daily newspaper using Twitter.”

When you tweet, if you are trying to build a business, 90 percent of the time, you should be providing valuable information. This will have more people following you to see what you say. You can use tweets also for surveys and questions.

There are a few tools to help better your Twitter Experience and I hope the information I have provided will have you stop scratching your head as you were asking, and what is twitter?

Here are some of the tools you may find useful:

TwitterFox: This Firefox web browser plugin allows you to view Tweets within your web browser so you don’t have to go to the twitter site.

TweetLater: With this service, you can schedule tweets and you can receive email digests of keyword activity in the Tweetosphere so you can join a conversation or track trends.

Ping.fm: If you have accounts with many services, such as LinkedIn and Facebook, you can post updates across ALL of your social media in one single step.

Twitter for Facebook: If you are on Facebook, this application forwards your Twitter updates directly to Facebook as status updates.

If you have a website, you can install a widget and everytime you update your twitter, the information is there. Google loves fresh content and you’re adding fresh content everytime you twitter.

Let me know how twitter has helped you.

Have a great day!

Kathy

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