Twitter’s business value

One of the most interesting challenges involved in working in social media is figuring out how to figure out what is the business value of different social media tools. Sometimes it’s pretty easy when you are using tools like Linkedin which is focused helping people create business relationships. Other times it can be a little more obscure.

Twitter is one of my favorite social media tools and it has been interesting trying to figure out what is its actual business value. As everyone knows, Twitter is a micro blogging tool that allows you to tell people what you’re doing at a particular moment. You can follow people and people can follow you. Twitter doesn’t have the same potential value as a standard blog because the posts are so short and specific in nature. The business value that I have discovered with Twitter comes in how rapidly you can connect with each other and how easy it is to follow everyone on the web (or from inside your favorite twitter app).

Presumably people follow you on Twitter when they are interested in what you’re doing. As it turns out, I do a lot of blogging and I have noticed that if I do a short post on Twitter telling them about a blog post I have just written and providing a link, I will get a spike in visitors to the blog. The business value for me centers around exposing people to the various different projects that I am involved in. And since it is a different set of people who follow me on Twitter than who subscribe to my blogs, ideally I can get some new subscribers. All that being said, I’m not recommending that you use Twitter for solely promoting blog posts. Use it for its intended purpose but don’t feel bad about doing a little self promotion at the same time. Most of us are people and business people at the same time.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 7th, 2008 at 8:12 am and is filed under social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.