Twitter: Damned if you do, Damned if you don’t
Twitter is awesome. Wait, let me rephrase that…Twitter is awesome, when it works. I have been a fan of Twitter since it was in private Beta and am anxiously awaiting the time when the down time and over capacity issues are behind us. So what is so awesome about it? Twitter and “micro-blogging” services in general are great tools for communication. It combines the ease of distribution you get with blogs and the instant gratification of instant messaging services. What more can you ask for?
So when Twitter is up and running should you use it? How do you use it? First you need to look and understand micro-blogging for what it is - instant communication on a mass scale. Secondly, Twitter type services can be put into three categories: personal, professional and promotional.
Personal
I have used Twitter to keep up with the daily going ons with my friends and acquaintances since the start. Twitter is a mass instant message and when used with a service like Brightkite.com you can really keep tabs of what your friends are doing and where they are. I cant even count the times we have had a quick get together that started with a Twitter (Tweet) announcement. From a personal perspective I love the use of Twitter for instant news - whether sports, political or world events. In fact when something big happens around the world you can bet people are Twittering about it within seconds.
Professional
Professional use of Twitter is probably the most important and valuable, for me at least. Twitter (as you can see from the chart below) is by far the most widely adopted micro-blogging tool out there. Being so widely adopted means the true movers and shakers within the digital world are using it. On a daily basis I am instantly connected to digital experts from around the world. Twitter takes blogs one step further and allows people to be actively involved in a instant conversation. Plus, where else can you shoot questions are see realtime thoughts of people like @KevinRose and @leolaporte whenever you like?
Promotional
Whether you own a company, a website, a blog or are into self promotion Twitter allows you to bring people into your conversation on a much more intimate level. Twitter and micro-blogging allows you to expand the blog mentality of communication. In fact Twitter should be a integral component of any Social Media Optimization (SMO) Strategy. Twitter is a great way for a company to promote its services, offer up the latest news and even directly communicate with your customers. For example, the CEO of @Zappos.com uses Twitter regularly to communicate with customers, fans, employees and partners. Have press releases? Twitter them. Have events you want to promote? Twitter them. Plain and simple, with a little effort and attention Twitter can become a invaluable resource for your promotional efforts.
So what is the future for Twitter? Well, considering that Twitter just closed a $15 million round of funding recently it isn’t going anywhere. But as we found out, the issue with Twitter and the ever-present downtime is not something that can be resolved with just throwing money and servers at it. It is about scaling / load-balancing to handle all of the Tweets that go out - especially when you take into account superusers like @JasonCalacanis and @Scobleizer who have over 25,000 followers and are regular users.
However when it comes down to it, no matter how cool and useful Twitter is, it wont matter if the current issues aren’t resolved. Twitter is close to going main stream and being the default micro-blogging platform. Jaiku? Pownce? Both are cool but aren’t Twitter. Looking at the data below, the race to become the micro-blogging standard isn’t even close, and even with the issues with Twitters reliability traffic hasn’t peaked or started to drop.
Bottom line is, if you aren’t on Twitter already, what are you waiting for? And of course make sure you follow me on Twitter…Twitter.com/khawe
