Using Twitter To Build and Engage Your Audience
Twitter is a new social media service that is being used by many power bloggers to keep in touch with their audience on a more personal level. It is called “micro-blogging” and rests somewhere between Blogging and Email. The basic concept is that you can subscribe to get short and brief commentary in the form of live alerts from other members by SMS, Instant Messenger or Email. These people can send it to you via their mobile phone or IM. You too can become someone who others choose to follow and get updates from… but it is very hard to create a large fan following on Twitter from scratch, unless you already have a huge audience that subscribes to you blog. Twitter picked up in popularity around 2007.
By following many individuals on Twiter, you can get a very fragmented experience of opinions, events, news, ideas and feedback. You can very easily follow thousands of users and listen and enter into conversations happening between multiple users at any point of time. By using Twitter actively, you can also push out messages to others and use it as a self promotion and marketing tool. Twitter can be used for both a professional and personal life, and its addictive - but once you understand how to use i, it can be a very effective tool.
Catch me on Twitter my URL is http://twitter.com/mediamavens and be the First to know everything, even before it is posted on this Blog….. Yes it’s Cool!
Definition from Wikipedia (skip this if you know this stuff already)
Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send “updates” (or “tweets”; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via short message service (e.g. on a cell phone), instant messaging, or a third-party application such as Twitterrific or Facebook. Updates are displayed on the user’s profile page and instantly delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. The sender can restrict delivery to those in his or her circle of friends (delivery to everyone is the default). Users can receive updates via the Twitter website, instant messaging, SMS, RSS, email or through an application. For SMS, four gateway numbers are currently available: short codes for the United States, Canada, and India, as well as a United Kingdom number for international use. Several third parties offer posting and receiving updates via email
