Twitter came onto the internet marketing scene in 2007 primarily. With its never before seen unique spin on advertising and keeping in touch with friends, it has become a popular tool to use. Most people who use twitter are using it daily, several times a day in fact. The basic structure of Twitter is in the term, micro-blogging. Micro-blogging is a form of multimedia blogging that allows users to send brief text updates or micro-media such as photos or audio clips and videos. Twitter is a site with one specific question, “What are you doing?”, users tend to answer this question in hundreds of thousands of ways and send a 140 character long message out to all the people who follow their tweets. Its that simple, you just share messages, read others, and send yours.
Twitter was founded in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, and Biz Stone. The real history surrounding the way Twitter was developed is more so due to Jack Dorsey and his career path through the years. Jack worked as a software developer, developing software for courier services and took notice to how, as the different businesses used the software and the main office could keep track of their various delivery or service vehicles, essentially, the employees were just reporting back what they were doing at that time. Nevertheless, it kept the dispatch office in constant contact with the drivers, which is a big deal as far as efficiency is concerned. Basically, what Twitter has become is a mixture of 3 different things.
· Jack’s Dispatch Software
· Instant Messaging
· Text messaging
With the coupling of these three elements of real time messages being sent, many things are possible. News tends to spread like wildfire on Twitter, friends are able to spawn a get-together in seconds, and marketers are able to instantly share their new ideas or ventures with every single one of their potential or current customers. To many this does not show value and at times Twitter comes under a bit of criticism. Truthfully, Twitter is a very useful tool, provided that you have contacts which either care what you have to say or can benefit from receiving information from you. For marketers, the service is generally used to broadcast URL’s to their various pages, products, and services which can be a tedious task.
Many people have since developed different applications meant to manage the features of Twitter and automate the process which aids in managing one’s time spent tweeting. These applications can be used for many different tasks on Twitter usually called “grunt work” if you are a marketer. Some features you will need are, unlimited account creation, management of all your accounts with the click of a button, auto-follow by targeted keywords/username/own followers, auto-unfollow of those who do not choose to follow you, auto-tweets through multiple accounts, direct messages to all followers, automatic reporting of Twitter trends to you per category, and some can even let you operate your Twitter accounts anonymously through a proxy IP address. Sadly though, most Twitter applications and management tools cannot do all of the above and very few can deliver an all in one solution to all your Twitter needs.
