Many of you may know of the recent surge in popularity of the Twitter service. Quite simply, the goal of Twitter is to answer a question: “What are you doing?” Last month (as I began to use the service more aggressively since I signed up in December) I realized that not everyone is answering that question anymore. Twitter is becoming more of a microblogging tool, a news announcement tool, a networking tool, and as of late, a marketing tool.
That’s right. Twitter can be used for marketing.
Currently, the hot “bot” (literally) update comes from Woot.com, an online store that provides daily deals. As you can see on Woot’s Twitter page, the site does not feature anything but hot deals on the products it is selling for the day.
For marketers who use Twitter, this is a great way to reach out to a different demographic. As you may be able to see from the screenshot, Woot currently has 1302 followers. Those 1302 followers, who made the choice to follow Woot’s announcements, receive highly targeted and desired traffic about products that Woot is selling.
Is this the only reach of Twitter? Apparently not. Today, TechCrunch announced that Twitter will be introducing web services, which will should broaden the Twitter audience.
Interestingly enough, for those who are not able to commit to blogging, particularly due to time restraints, using Twitter would be an interesting exercise for companies to try communicating their own announcements. Some blogs already provide headlines on the Twitter site. But if you didn’t have a blog, you could limit your announcements to 140 characters (that’s a Twitter restriction) and share what you think would best serve the community that follows you. This would, as previously stated, save time and give you the opportunity to have a “blogging” voice in “microblogging” terms.
If you’re looking to get on the Twitter bandwagon, tell your family and friends and let them sign up so that they can follow your business. The site itself makes broadcasting a lot easier with a very targeted audience.
Well if I set up a blog and fed product links to it which were current special offers, it would be called a splog by most bloggers.
I love this function- how web 2.0: http://twittermap.com/maps
I agree that twitter can be a great marketing tool, but the barrier is that not everyone has a PDA device, and those who do, like myself, do not think to use it to tell the world what I’m doing.
Maybe you can do one of those walk-Thurs on how to post on Twitter using the PDA device? Maybe advertisers will start to pay people to post where they are in real time and talk about what they just consumed.
I’m excited to see where this goes.
we’ve launched our twitter account today to update our followers about new hiring companies and fresh job openings in China.
http://twitter.com/newchinacareer
This is expected for Twitter to become marketing tool, first thing I did in early twitter days is to take good user names. Question is when user names market will start?
You are so right. I tried this on our London hotels travel site. Users from twitter engaged much better than other visitors from search etc. – hope it’ll help with conversions over time with higher traffic. See the case study
here
yes Now twitter is a tool (i will say) to bring traffic and to make aware of a new product..people are staying 24 hours in that to make marketing…