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August 18, 2009
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If you’ve dipped your toes into social networks or web marketing you have likely heard a lot about Twitter. Growing from roughly 1.3 million visitors per month in January of this year to more than 21 million visitors per month by June (source: Quantcast.com), Twitter has quickly become one of the fastest-growing, and most talked-about marketing channels on the web. This rapid growth and wide adoption across many demographics makes it ideal for financial professionals looking for new ways to reach potential clients and build thought leadership.
What is Twitter exactly?
Like any other social network or blog, Twitter is a web-based communication tool that enables you to share thoughts and opinions in very brief bursts with colleagues, friends and the larger web community, as well as an ever-expanding network of ”followers.” Even though it is web-based, one key advantage of Twitter is that you can choose to send and receive these updates with your mobile phone or other portable device, even without expensive web access-enabled data plans.
The social networking news blog Mashable calls Twitter “a micro-blogging platform which allows you to publish a short message of less than 140 characters through different media like Instant Messenger, cell phones and the web.” Why only 140 characters? Because Twitter was built to interface with mobile phones and other portable devices using ”Short Message Service” or SMS, (otherwise known as text messaging).
This simple distinction has made all the difference in the world. By building an entire community around a network that extends beyond computers to reach cell phones, PDAs, and other portable devices via SMS, Twitter has made it possible for you to stay connected economically.
Twitter can help you:
- Share thoughts, opinions, news, links, and personal updates;
- Follow other users on Twitter to receive their tweets, and get followed in return;
- Respond to and converse with your network of Twitter connections; and
- Search all of Twitter for tweets that are relevant or of interest to you.
Log in to Twitter and you will see all manner of tweets—quick bursts of opinion, news, links to articles, and updates, often in abbreviated and cryptic code. At first glance, they can be esoteric and even challenging to interpret.
So why tweet? Twitter can be very powerful when combined with the other communication channels. While it doesn’t allow for the kind of in-depth analysis and the specific details that you can offer your clients through your web site, email messages, bylined articles or other intellectual properties, it offers immediacy—that’s the primary appeal of Twitter.Display article as PDF for printing.
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