Catch The Twitter Wave, It's Not Too Late

My daughter went to Orlando Florida for a four-day acting training and audition event

. Since she was a minor, a parent was required to be with her during the trip. After some discussion with my wife and daughter, I was chosen to take the trip with her. During the trip it seemed every hour or so a friend, sister, brother, her mom, or grandparent was sending her a text asking what she was doing and how things were going. As the trip progressed she began simply sending text messages to a group of people with frequent updates.

Near the end of the trip we spent a few minutes discussing this and I asked her about using Twitter to do the same thing, but more efficiently. With Twitter she could post her photos to Flickr and videos to YouTube, then include links with her Tweets. In addition, there were others she had not added to her texting group that would have been very interested in her trip. She agreed. Next time she takes a trip of this nature she will use Twitter.

I thought about myself traveling to a trade show or training event. As I discover new ideas, products, or items of interest I can send a Tweet. If I snap a photo or a quick video I can directly post them to Flickr or YouTube and reference them in the Tweet. What a great way to immediately share new acquired knowledge to a large number of people very quickly. Twitter is a free microblogging and messaging service created by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, and Biz Stone in 2006. This real-time information network connects the sender with followers through small bursts of information or messages called "Tweets." A Tweet can be a maximum of 140 characters in length. According to Twitter, as of September 14, 2010, Twitter had 175 million registered users with 95 million tweets written per day.

In the first seven months of 2010, 44% of Twitter's accounts were created according to Sysomos, a social media tracking company. This is a significant growth spurt for an already popular social media site. The statistic provoked several significant thoughts for me. First, if you think you are behind the times adopting Twitter into your social media marketing plan, think again. Almost half of the Twitter accounts were created during this year!

Second, a question. Were all of these accounts created to use Twitter for personal or business purposes? It turns out they weren't. The new accounts created do not equal the new active users. This means you need to be careful, many of the new accounts are Zombie accounts, according to data from the Pew Research Center. Zombie accounts are people or companies signing up to spam using Twitter or annoy us in other ways with Twitter.

So perhaps the growth is a little slower than the statistics would imply, but this is still amazing growth. If you haven't already began using Twitter as part of your social media marketing plan, you can still catch the wave.

by: Bradley Hess

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