What is twitter
Twitter is a status-updating or microblogging social networking website. It is a breakthrough in social networking because it takes communication into another level. Before, a person can only update his status (e.g. what he's doing, where he is) at a certain time. But with Twitter and its mobile integration, he can update his status almost all throughout the day and get in touch with people that matters to him the most.
But the functions of Twitter do not stop there. It is now used by various fields. Business, for example, has used Twitter to get in touch with customers on a personal level. It is also a nice place to meet people from different parts of the world that shares the same interests. Furthermore, its possibilities to promote new technology, news and products can't be denied.
Twitter have been used by companies, bloggers and agencies to promote their brand
Advantages and disadvantages of using Twitter for Internet Marketing
Advantages of twitter
Your Internet marketing can be done free of cost if you use Twitter wisely. Your target market is out there for you to seek and understand. Understand from their tweets, their passion and interests. Do your research on your target market by following the tweets of your target market for better understanding. Identify the strategies used by your competitors by following their tweets as well.
Twitter allows you to network efficiently and with large groups of people. Twitter and its third party applications allow you to segregate and interact with your target markets effectively. You can direct your Internet marketing campaigns at relevant groups efficiently by using Twitter
Twitter allows you to communicate directly with your target market instantly. Normally, the process of communication takes time. For example, if you have a Website, the communication would be via polls, which are not personal or though contact forms which are time consuming and impersonal as well. With twitter, you can expect instant communication with your target market. You may have just posted a tweet, but a reply from your target market could come in an instant as well. Twitter helps you to gather real time intelligence from your very own target market as well as obtain valuable feedback. The speed of communication is just fantastic with Twitter. Moreover, your near approach helps to builds lasting relationship as you will come cross as a company that cares for its consumers instead of just hard selling.
Disadvantages of twitter
Twitter is the number one site for spammers. You will have to filter and weed out spammers from your lists from time to time, if you want to have a good gauge of your target market. Otherwise, the followers total will be an inflated number which will not help in your Internet marketing campaigns. Filtering spam tweets is a lot of hard work. Other means of Internet marketing may seem feasible in the long run.
Twitter has no applications rather than other sites like Facebook, Friendster and MySpace. It also has no groups, videos, blogs, classified ads, forums, marketplace and other unique and popular social networking menus. You can only upload one picture, which is your avatar and must be small, compare to other social networks which you can upload pictures as many as you want. You also cannot upload music files here on Twitter, but you can upload on the other social networks.
What does twitter do for businesses?
Twitter is a communication platform that helps businesses stay connected to their customers. As a business, you can use it to quickly share information with people interested in your company, gather real-time market intelligence and feedback, and build relationships with customers, partners and other people who care about your company. As an individual user, you can use Twitter to tell a company (or anyone else) that you've had a great—or disappointing—experience with their business, offer product ideas, and learn about great offers.
How does it work?
Twitter lets you write and read messages of up to 140 characters, or the very length of this sentence, including all punctuation and spaces. The messages are public and you decide what sort of messages you want to receive—Twitter being a recipient driven information network. In addition, you can send and receive Twitter messages, or tweets, equally well from your desktop or your mobile phone.
When you combine messages that are quick to write, easy to read, public, controlled by the recipient and exchangeable anywhere, you’ve got a powerful, real-time way to communicate. And real-time communication is turning out to be ground-breaking for users and businesses alike.
How do businesses use Twitter?
Twitter connects you to your customers right now, in a way that was never before possible. For example, let’s say you work for a custom bike company. If you run a search for your brand, you may find people posting messages about how happy they are riding your bikes in the French Alps—giving you a chance to share tips about cyclist-friendly cafes along their route.
Others may post minor equipment complaints or desired features that they would never bother to contact you about—providing you with invaluable customer feedback that you can respond to right away or use for future planning. Still others may twitter about serious problems with your bikes—letting you offer customer service that can turn around a bad situation.
You don’t have to run a bike shop or a relatively small company to get good stuff out of Twitter. Businesses of all kinds, including major brands, increasingly find that listening and engaging on the service leads to happier customers, passionate advocates, key product improvements and, in many cases, more sales.
A key benefit
One of Twitter’s key benefits is that it gives you the chance to communicate casually with customers on their terms, creating friendly relationships along the way—tough for corporations to do in most other mediums.
But Twitter isn’t just about useful immediacy. The conversational nature of the medium lets you build relationships with customers, partners and other people important to your business. Beyond transactions, Twitter gives your constituents direct access to employees and a way to contribute to your company; as marketers say, it shrinks the emotional distance between your company and your customers. Plus, the platform lends itself to integration with your existing communication channels and strategies. In combination, those factors can make Twitter a critical piece of your company’s bigger digital footprint.
For instance, let’s say you run a big retail website. In addition to learning more about what your customers want, you can provide exclusive Twitter coupon codes, link to key posts on your blog, share tips for shopping online, and announce specials at store locations. And you can take things a step further by occasionally posting messages about fun, quirky events at your HQ, giving others a small but valuable connection with the people in your company.
Tip: Companies sometimes worry that twittering might require a lot of staff time or even hiring new people to maintain an account. In fact, Twitter works best for businesses when you start slow, devoting a few minutes a day to see whether and how it’s valuable to you.
Twitter Application development
We need to use the Twitter API and Twitter Content to develop a Service to search, display, analyze, retrieve, view, and submit information to or on Twitter
Twitter API
http://dev.twitter.com/pages/api_overview
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