Free Marketing: 101 Low and No-Cost Ways to Grow Your Business, Online and Off

CHAPTER 47

TWITTER AS A MARKETING TOOL

Twitter is about instant online conversations viewed and participated in by friends, strangers, and everything in between.

The hesitancy to get on Twitter.com by most businesses and marketers is understandable.

Founder Evan Williams founded Twitter with the basic question: “What are you doing?”

How can the millions of random posts left by millions of users daily possibly be used as a marketing tool? I get into that a bit later in the chapter, but first a few basics, lessons, and warnings about Twitter.

THE BASICS

On Twitter anyone can say anything they want in short posts added chronologically to their Twitter wall or timeline. If you choose to follow someone on Twitter this means whenever they post a message to their own Twitter wall, that message will also show up on your timeline. Those that follow you will see your posts on their timeline. Everyone gets to pick and choose who they will follow. Typically, celebrities have far more followers than they do people they follow. If you don't have followers it means no one is listening (yet), but all posts are pretty much public material that anyone can search Twitter and see. That's about as simply as I can explain Twitter from my perspective.

Twitter is where millions of users go to build authentic relationships with like-minded people from around the world on any number of various topics. The intricate web of connections that are formed on Twitter are hard to even capture or describe. People ...