Using Social Networking For Business
There's Twitter, Myspace, Facebook, Digg, and host of others that can do more than just connect you with old friends. Some folks are using the magic of social networking to make money with their businesses. Twitter and Facebook are the most successful in helping businesses grow but You Tube is now becoming an important free service to businesses when it comes to video posting. See more about YouTube in the Webinar section.
The World Of Twitter
What Is Twitter?
Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author's profile page and delivered to the author's subscribers who are known as followers. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications. While the service costs nothing to use, accessing it through SMS may incur phone service provider fees.
Since its creation in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Twitter has gained notability and popularity worldwide. It is sometimes described as the "SMS of the Internet since the use of Twitter's application programming interface for sending and receiving short text messages by other applications often eclipses the direct use of Twitter.
Twitter is ranked as one of the 50 most popular websites worldwide by Alexa's web traffic analysis. Although estimates of the number of daily users vary because the company does not release the number of active accounts, a February 2009 Compete.com blog entry ranked Twitter as the third most used social network based on their count of 6 million unique monthly visitors and 55 million monthly visits. In March 2009, a Nielsen.com blog ranked Twitter as the fastest-growing site in the Member Communities category for February 2009. Twitter had a monthly growth of 1,382 percent, Zimbio of 240 percent, followed by Facebook with an increase of 228 percent. However, only 40 percent of Twitter's users are retained.
The Twitter Craze has spread all over the worlds and even has many celebrities getting involved. Basically you tweet to say periodic statements about what you are doing. Ashton Kutcher from MTV's Punk'd fame, created a stir when he races to reach 1 million followers. The jury is still out on wether he actually follows all those tweets himself. Posting many personal links to pictures or videos of he and his wife, actress, Demi Moore, doesn't seem to make musch of a difference, but it is often advised not to share too muc personal info with strangers in the cyber universe. However, in regards to using Twitter for business, it seems to make some people a lot of money as they find all kinds of tools to enhance Twitter's capabilities. See our links for those tools and have a Tweetin' good time!
