Chapter 46
Twitter and You
Twitter is a broadcast marketing tool.
—Guy Kawasaki
Of all of the social media platforms out there, Twitter is probably the most challenging one to grasp—and certainly the hardest to master from a business-use perspective. For small business people especially, both Facebook and LinkedIn make sense and are intuitive. But Twitter is different and takes some getting used to. The stream of tweets scrolling down your timeline, the hashtag conversations (#), having followers you never met—it all can seem a bit out of context until you get the hang of it.
Certainly that was the case for me when I first came across Twitter and started writing about it in my USA TODAY column. That was in April 2009, a time when Twitter was at the tipping point, what with everyone talking about it, Ashton Kutcher trying to get a million followers, and so on. Back then, I infamously wrote a column in which I suggested that small business people should not tweet. I immediately knew that I had struck some nerve (which nerve exactly I was not sure) when my editor gave the column the following headline: Ask an Expert—Should Entrepreneurs Twitter? Uh, No. Not a good sign, that.
Here is a portion of what I wrote:
“Twitter is all the rage. Everyone is either tweeting or talking about it or following someone, and so yes, I get that Twitter is the flavor of the month. But know what else I know? Sometimes you don't want or don't need the flavor of the month; sometimes you need chocolate ...
