Never one to have been an early adopter of social media, I have only just recently gotten around to signing up with the latest craze – Twitter.
Basically, Twitter allows it’s users to create a profile and post short messages, either through the site or by mobile phone, which are then sent to the page, and or phone, of anyone “following” the user in order to allow your friends/colleagues etc to know exactly what your doing.
Now, I’ll admit, I didn’t immediately get what the point of this, or the use would be. I don’t feel the need to let everyone know exactly when I’ve just sneezed or realised I’ve been walking about with my fly undone, and I’m pretty sure not even my closest friends and family would really care! But after a little more thought and a quick scout through some user’s profiles, I began to realise that it actually has alot of potential beyond simply keeping in touch with friends.
Even celebrities get caught "flying low"...
One of the better and more creative uses for Twitter that I have seen is London Tower Bridge’s profile. Some clever clog has written a piece of code that works with Twitter in order to automatically provide information on when the bridge will be opening (and why) and when it will be closing. This is clearly handy for anyone living in London, and regularly crossing the Thames at this point, to be updated with via their mobile.
Another method, employed by Objective Associates‘ very own Mr Software Scotland himself, is to mini-blog on events as they happen. Unfortunately, understanding this mini-blogging takes a bit of thought, sometimes more than my brain is capable of!
Understanding mini-blogging on Twitter can, at times, require more than moderate intelligence...
In SEO circles, Twitter has received alot of press as a useful method of driving referral traffic to your (or your clients’) website. However, gaining referral traffic only really works if you have interesting content that will appeal to a reasonable number of people. I’m not sure many people are going to link to our Web Wise Business website on twitter to tell their friends about “web design scotland” as it’s just not really one of those topics people tend to talk about. Or maybe we’re just not prompting them enough…
