Joining the Twitter Social Media Network

It is astounding to me, to observe the way social media is growing on the internet. I have watched the internet with great interest since it was a baby back in my first days as a network engineer. I have a Myspace page, a Facebook page, etc.

Lately I see advertising and articles about Twitter and twittering everywhere I look. I finally broke down and joined Twitter so that I could experience it for myself and see if it is a tool that would be useful to me.

What is Twitter?
From the wikipedia article:
"Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author's profile page and delivered to the author's subscribers who are known as followers. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access."

The people who created Twitter have done a brilliant job of marketing. Seemingly out of the blue it appeared, and all of the sudden, "tweeting" is a really cool thing to do. I mean when it first started there was no one on it right, so no one knew it was the cool thing to do. I wonder if the idea of calling it twitter derives from the word Twitterpated which means "to be completely enamoured with something."

What do you do when you want something like Twitter to take off? You make it seem like Everyone is doing it. Then like magic, Everyone is doing it. Absolutely brilliant. My guess is that they started the whole advertising campain with a comprehensive marketing strategy (and a sizeable budget) utilizing google adwords and similar products.

Now, the internet marketers are all over it, I see blog articles left and right now, "How to make money using Twitter." With good reason, if you can build up a decent sized twitter following then send out a "tweet" that says "right now I am working on my blog at this web address" instant traffic to your page. Incredibly useful for marketing.

With my personal interest in internet marketing, and the fervent desire to establish a profitable niche of my own to generate a residual income stream, it would be perilous for me to ignore the twitter phenomenon. Naturally I spent some time looking into the subject and finding out more about what it is and created my own twitter account.

There seem to be some solid ideas out there for making money with this media. Unfortunately, the foremost of which appears to be selling your own e-book called "How to make money with Twitter." I tend to bookmark the more effective looking of those type of websites in a folder I have named "Internet Marketing Landmines." More on that subject another time.

The fastest way to learn about a social media is to join it and see what its like. So I joined and it seems pretty neat, all of my favorite celebrity people are on there and with the click of a button I am now a follower of over 25 interesting personalities. Hesitant to join twitter, I did not think that you could really use it to much good effect if you are just following people, and don't like to text message much, I see now that I was mistaken.

Within 2 minutes of joining Twitter I had 3 followers of my own. Just random people, who must watch the listing of new Tweeters looking for opportunities to promote their own blog, website or product. Looking at my Twitter homepage I noticed, and was more than a little surprised, that I had my own followers so fast. I clicked on the followers to see who could possibly be following my twitter page on such short notice.

What I found is that with each of my new followers there was a link that directed me to the website or blog they were promoting. That is a very slick marketing tactic. Now I want to direct your attention back to the Wikipedia definition.

"Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access."

That means that if you leave it to the default settings and you send out a tweet, there is no telling how many people might see it. Fast, free marketing. I am definitely going to explore this particular social networking media more in depth as a marketing tool (as well as for fun), and see what good fortune and back links twittering can bring my way. I will come back and let you know what I find out.

Update: I spent the day playing around with Twitter and had a great time. There are many interesting people in the community and you see some really funny tweets. Most people are promoting something or another, usually in a kind of subtle way, but its done in generally good taste. As long as you don't spam ads, you can definitely use it as a marketing tool. The traffic to the website I listed in my Twitter bio went up dramatically just from one day of interacting with it and I didn't do any spamming, I just interacted and met a few people, it was really fun actually. Watch out though, I think it can be addictive.

I have a question for you: What are you doing right now?