What's All the Twitter About?

The topic has continued to come up and marketers are trying to figure it out. After growing at a rate of 1,382% between February 2008 and February 2009 and being recorded as the fastest growing "member community destination" (according to Nielsen), there must be something worth exploring here. In fact, Twitter's growth has exceeded that of Facebook during the same period and is only behind Facebook and MySpace in terms of popularity.

To help explain the phenomena, I've decided to summarize some points from Wikipedia which really explains it best:

What is Twitter?

• A social network
• A micro-blogging service
• Often described as the "SMS of the Internet"

How Does it Work?

• Users send and read other users' updates known as tweets
• Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters
• Updates are displayed on the user's profile page and
  delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them


• Delivery can be restricted to a circle of “friends” or available to everyone / anyone by default
• Updates can be sent or received via website, SMS, RSS (read only) or applications (Tweetie, Twitterific, TwitterBerry, etc.)

A major reason for its success is that users do NOT need to visit the site to take part in the community!

Stay tuned for "10 Ways to Use Twitter Effectively", "10 Ways How Not to Use Twitter" and "How To Be a Power Tweeter"...