DISQUS

Guillaume · 10 months ago

Good post! I would also add that what I have found particularly enjoyable/interesting about Twitter is the whole quest for building your community. It is pretty exciting!

mikefixs · 10 months ago

I agree: the Facebook integration is great, but when will I be able to integrate in other venues?

Alex Schleber · 10 months ago

Some good points here, especially re: Twitter's simplicity being a major factor, both in adoption rates as well as the endless stream of Twitter integrations, 3rd party add-on services, and other ideas (including the novel linguistic creations!). There is clear power in the Twitter brand name: short, evocative of its purpose, & people somehow like saying/repeating it.

For more on why simplicity usually wins in business, check out this post:

http://businessmindhacks.com/post/assorted-robert-scoble-posts-prove-simplicity-wins

Gregg Blanchard · 10 months ago

Great points on #s 2 and 3. When I first started on Twitter I felt restricted by the 140 character limit. Now...I love it for all the reasons you mentioned. The simplicity of the whole thing amazes me. Follow whoever you want with one click...beautiful.

Manjit Johal · 10 months ago

Excellent article, I think you have really captured some of the main reasons for Twitter's success. I think the point about focussing on real time is often overlooked but is definitely one of the key reasons Twitter has taken off.

However I'm not sure if I totally agree with last point; at first glance your follower number does look like an indication of authority, but there are many users out there with high follower numbers who aren't really authoritative at all.

mingyeow · 10 months ago

not really authoritative at all is an understatement - sometimes, these
people are complete shams. ;)
M

christoph · 10 months ago

Aren't you forgetting a few points? Like "Don't let the absence of a business model stop you"? "If the only way to run it is to burn other people's money, do still go ahead"?

Content-wise, twitter has become THE leading part of the verbal diarrhea cluttering Web 2.0. Because thanks to twitter, you don't even need to be able to form sentences anymore to "make yourself heard". Brevity? Far from that: twitterites will make up on the 140 character limit by posting 30 messages a day! It's the outlet for people who have no creativity, no words, no imagination - and still somehow want to show up and show off out there. "Scale it down to the point where it meets your audience's skills" - that's the secret of twitter!

twitter, essentially, means going back to an age where men conversed in short grunts and burps. If you're someone whose communicative skills have always been bad, who doesn't know how to take pictures, how to be funny or elaborate, who's always the odd man out in a conversation: then twitter is for you!

And the fact that there's many, many millions out there fitting to that target group and sustaining twitter's "success" doesn't make it any better.

Ian Farmer · 10 months ago

Great tips thank you. The explosion if Twitter in the UK continues at a pace. Its all Radio Five Live is talking about and simon Mayo picked up 3500+ followers in a week - I shpould be so lucky! Last week they even covered it on The One Show on BBC1. Twitter is here to stay - even in the UK. Integration to other social media will be key - linkedin in has to be a target?

justinrfrench · 10 months ago

@rohitbhargava-
@justinrfrench here- i must say you are RIGHT ON with this posting- especially twitter for entrepreneurs- i would be willing to pay for twitter ABSOLUTELY! i hope they dont start charging, but becasue of the growth of my circle of influence, it has helped form a new internet marketing division of my firm and i couldnt me more passionate about how social networking will save small business. Thanks

p.s. let me know if you want to write a guest post on our blog!

Young · 10 months ago

Well, I will use Twitter to be an entrepreneur.

Tom · 10 months ago

I share tweet to share cool things I find interesting and I like visting sites my followers share with me also

Mari-Lyn Hudson · 9 months ago

I have learned by being on Twitter that, one needs to focus, I don't always follow those who follow me, and I am now strategizing who and where my suspects are. I have 3 different services - this ought to keep me busy. Thank you for the information, especially the ranking.

Travis Campbell · 9 months ago

Excellent job identifying 'lessons' (I'm a big fan of those). A bit of a sidepiece, and very difficult to duplicate is there branding. When competitors emerged, people would say, I signed up at "XYZ microblog", it's like * Twitter*...

Beyond that the spinoff branding vocabulary is unprecidented. Tweetups, Twestival, Tweeple, on and on. There has to be a new page in the dictionary to accomodate all the new terms.

As stated, this is difficult to reproduce, but makes for an interesting lesson.

Keep it coming.

Marito · 9 months ago

Great post! Yet.. Don't forget that when this guys launched twitter they probably didn't expect this success or this road the site would take. The flexibility and the speed which how they changed and switched the business to where it was going was a key factor in their success. For entrepreneurs, it's like when Guy Kawasaki said "let the flowers bloom"

Wendy B · 9 months ago

Great post - I am finding that my Twitter relationships are in many ways more useful than connections I've made through Facebook or LinkedIn. Not to minimize either of those outlets, because I do gain a lot from both - but the information shared freely is astounding.

You need only ask on Twitter when you are perplexed about anything from a PC problem to a marketing idea to whatever your question may be - and within seconds there are endless folks willing to provide sincere assistance.

Just be sure to always give back more than you receive! Pay it forward!

@socialpmchick

John Ferguson · 9 months ago

twitter makes a useful product. People like to connect and twitter allows that, but much of their success is purely in getting brand awareness so far. But what happens when they burn all their cash? The VCs are gonna want ROI. Twitter itself doesn't seem to want to make money, so how long can they keep tapping the VCs?

Anyway, will twitter last even if it does start to make money? (which even Facebook is finding hard) I love twitter so far. I have found some interesting people to follow and I get arstechnica.com updates thru it. But I suddenly got a surge of followers (barely ten or so, but about double what I had) this weekend and I'm thinking, do I really want all these marketers/SEO/trend harvesters following me? I don't like blocking people arbitrarily, so I spend a minute or 2 looking at the person's tweet history and consider their bio. Some I let follow me without me following them. Some I block. I mean why do they want to follow me? I'm not an internet celebrity. I have some interesting tweets, but not many. Do I want to follow my follower if I don't know him and he has no reputation? Sometimes. Other times I just assume the potential follower is a lazy marketer who doesn't care about me beyond how much more money he can charge his clients because he follows one hundred thousand people and his competitor follows ninety thousand.

Anyway, my point is, if twitter becomes like work for me as I try to audit my potential followers, I will abandon it (or hide from the public timeline). So would many others. Then what would the marketers/SEO/trend harvesters do to get market data? I suggest they stop following and just use the twitter API to do automated searching on the public timeline.

If all that was TLDR for you, consider this: your business needs a consistent way to make money WITHOUT venture capital. In that way, twitter is a lesson in how not to do it. Also, if you think you can make money by following tons of people, maybe you can, but you might make more and be more responsive to your customers by being extremely selective in whom you follow and by interacting with them about your product. Make it at least look as if you care about them beyond their money.

uPVC doors · 9 months ago

Nice post By Rohit. I made account on twitter but don't get in completely coz i didn't understand the functionality of twitter.

salsabor_tropical · 8 months ago

excellent points. thanks for sharing

salsabor_tropical · 8 months ago

very interesting. I like this article. very informative.

Sandra D. · 8 months ago

None of my customers or potential customers are on Twitter.
What good does twitter do me?

It seems most people are selling or pushing their business on Twitter, but where are the customers? Lots of stores talking to each other, nobody listening.

My tests of moving traffic to my website via Twitter: I have 500+ followers. In a one week period only 37 hits came from Twitter-related traffic.
I could get more traffic by chaning the keywords in my website meta-tags.

Toni · 8 months ago

I think Twitter is already mainstream. If I'm using it, then it is definitely mainstream!

chad · 8 months ago

The ego piece of rank is without the most powerful piece that will really mean a lot more to the owners of popular Twitter pages. Think about how easy it was to get blog rss in the beginning and how much noise you need to swim through now. The same thing should happen to Twitter soon and the early riser will reap the lions share of the market. Great article by the way.

Shan · 5 months ago

Great Observations ! Twitter has become part of my Business !

nursing uniforms · 3 months ago

this most important factor i.e Integrate with the most popular competition from facebook.

Marcanomany · 2 months ago

You got a nice blog up there.

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