3 Ways To Use Twitter – spamming is not one of them

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

How do you use Twitter?

I am increasing my use of Twitter. I have been trying to figure out whether or not I like Twitter as a daily tool, and I am leaning towards a positive answer. As I see it there are numerous of ways you could use Twitter, and I am sure I have only started with the most basic functionality (tweeting my thoughts, posts and whereabouts). In this post I will try to discuss and figure out different ways you could use Twitter.

Make sure you do not miss something

When I wake up every morning, before I hit the shower, I make sure I check teletext so I do not miss out on anything important. It would be pretty embarassing coming to work and everybody are talking about planes flying into buildings or other breaking news I easily could have managed to collect. For other people radio or morning tv serve the same purpose, but when you have small kids, morning tv is Bob the builder, Shaun the sheep and not CNN. I believe Twitter serve as my niche radio or niche teletext. As long as I follow the people in my niche, all over the world, I will surely not miss even the smallest news in my niche. As someone who is looking forward to learn more, get the news when it happens and have input for blog posts, I really appreciate this part of how to use Twitter. Of course tools such as Thwirl and Twitterific helps you on achieving this.

Promoting Your Stuff

This is a tricky part. I have seen people mixing it up pretty good, not only spamming Twitter with links back to their blogs, but also managing to actually do 140 character analysis worth reading on their own. I think this is something you should gradually manage to find a strategy for, that suits you and the ones following you. It all boils down to personal branding, do you wanna be considered a spammer or someone who adds value to other peoples tweet-list. I have actully unsubscribed to a lot of people I had higher beliefs in before I started following them. Twitter is such a powerful tool, as soon as you say something it is availble on all your followers dashboard, that forces us to have some kind of plan on how we would like other to look at us. My strategy is to always promote my blog posts, because I believe that the people who have choosed to follow me may also be interested in reading my blog posts. On top of that I try to post link to resources I find valuable. In order to promote your stuff, I think it is important that you also add value to the network through interaction and actually respond to the people who you follow or are followed by.

Feeding Content into other systems

Twitter exposes all content via API:s, this makes sure you can build applications posting to Twitter, and applications reading from Twitter. We have seen a lot of applications for updating Twitter and some applications for searching Twitter (before Twitter had search). I believe that the next step is to use Twitter as a tool for updating external system, such as posting content other social networks (yes we see that today on FriendFeed), but actually being able to trigger specific actions on the other system. Because lets be honest: Twitter is only a tool for updating with short texts, we have only started to playing with the possibilities on what we can do with such tools. 140 characters are short for stories, but long enough for sending actions, events, triggers and commands to other systems. I believe that we will start to see more system accounts on Twitter where followers can run system commands by “replying” to the system account (@system Location:New York, Group:user1,user2,user3). Maybe I am way out here, but the tools we could build are amazingly interesting. Using Twitter like this is to see Twitter as a part of your application architecture. The benefits you get is that the tool is widely spread, easy to use and have a lot of API:s.

Conclusion and Analysis

Twitter has gained an enormous amount of users in a short time, as always, the geeks where there first, and a lot of people think it is a geek thing, but, I am sure that tweeting will, as blogging has, move from the geeks to ordinary sane people with bigger interests than programming and internet. When that happens, we will see an explosion of different ways to use Twitter, or twitter-clones, enabling new features for spreading whatever users are interested to spread quickly to a wide network of connected followers. The big questions are How do you use Twitter and How do you think Twitter will evolve?

Tweet This

No related posts.