When I first took a look at Twitter I thought "man this is stupid. Why would anyone want to know what I'm doing right now?" I'm sure a lot of people shared that reaction, but here's the thing, there's about 6 million users now and growing exponentially. So I've taken a second look, and yes, like everybody else, I'm hooked. Here's why.
It's true, I don't care what you and your friends were up to last night, but Twitter offers more than that. I've been busy following some really interesting folks out there who have a lot to say and recommend about Internet (or Inbound) marketing (among other things of course). The brilliant thing is that you have to tweet, i.e say something interesting in 140 characters or less. That keeps blowhards like me from rambling on endlessly like I'm doing here. It also means that people will notice, maybe even pay attention. So a lot of people use it to recommend Web sites and blogs where there is more detail about subjects that interest me, or you.
This is much better than Google in my view, because now I have a collection of experts out there doing my research for me. Sure, a lot of it is self-promotion, but you can see through that pretty quickly, and you can always stop following the spammers.
As far as Inbound Marketing is concerned, I'm using Twitter to connect to people and yes, to tell them about my contributions in this blog and elsewhere. It doesn't stop there, though. I also go to their sites and blogs and make comments. That's the connection part. Once the connections are made, they tend to spread like wildfire (or yes, viruses).
So Twitter is really cool. I'm totally addicted now, which is probably the big downside. Here are some tools I've found that help me tweet every day. There are plenty more appearing on a daily basis.
- twhirl - a cool twitter client that pops up on your desktop instead of requiring a browser - easy to monitor, respond, tweet
- tweetdeck - similar to twhirl, but has a nice organization into columns
- tweetie - a very cool iPhone twitter client (you gotta take it with you!)
- twitterific - similar to tweetie, i like the layout a bit better
Oh yeah, one piece of advice (from a newbie): If you're going to use Twitter for business, use it for business only. If your followers are fellow professionals, they may be turned off reading about your adventures in eating your Cheerios every day. You can always create another Twitter account with a different e-mail for your pub crawling etc. My 2.
