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Before reading this post make sure to follow me on Twitter @iancraft11 and enjoy the barrage of chapel tweets you will see on every Tuesday. In all seriousness, marketing yourself, your tweets, or your product is just that simple. With the push of a button a person can see your content, and with another press send that content to millions of people in an instant. So, a simple social media site, or a marketing genius?

In 2006, a social media site was born with little more than just five words. “Just setting up my twttr.” The incredibly simple social media site was created on the top of a playground. A group of creators sat on top of a slide to create an “idea so simple you don’t even have to think about it, just write.”

Every second, on average, around 6,000 tweets are tweeted on Twitter, try saying that 5 times fast, which corresponds to over 350,000 tweets sent per minute, 500 million tweets per day and around 200 billion tweets per year.From when Twitter started up in 2006 and until 2009, the amount of tweets grew at crazy high rates, approaching a 1,400% gain in daily volume year to year and around 1,000% gain in the amount per year.

Twitter is a very simple social media platform. You say what you want when you want to and to who you want to. There’s only one hitch, it’s limited to 140 characters, so as to limit the ranting factor you have on Facebook. You can even link a picture, video, or Vine to the tweet. Twitter created a feature called a “retweet” early in its life where the user can share a tweet with all that follow them with the press of a button. This allows the content to possibly be seen by 100s of 1,000s of people. Hashtags are another example of how twitter can reach the masses. If you put a hashtag, a pound sign followed by a word, on your tweet, people can search that hashtag and see all the tweets with that inside it. Followers are what make the twitter experience really interesting to the normal user. Instead of being bombarded by whatever may come your way, you can pick and choose who you follow limiting the content you see to whatever you like. A person can have multiple accounts. So, if you are someone who loves fashion or sports and likes to comment and rant about that, you can have a separate account for those specific content users you follow so as you don’t spam the friends who follow you with a mass of retweets on a topic.

As Twitter grew into this massive entity, businesses caught on immediately. Marketing teams are constantly looking for ways to easily spread their message or product to all corners of the earth, and Twitter makes this mission fit right in the palm of your hand. Twitter allows you to promote a product better than any other social media site. You can connect with millions of people with the touch of a button. Think about it, the site has 288 million monthly “highly-active” users. This doesn’t even count the full 2 billion accounts on the site. If a business, say a shoe company tweeted a picture of a new shoe and a celebrity with millions of followers retweeted it, the tweet would immediately be seen by a great deal of people, who could then retweet it to all their followers and so on. Your product just reached as many people as it would through one Super Bowl commercial, because of one retweet. Oh and did I mention this kind of marketing is free? It’s because of this that Twitter will stay as a staple in business marketing for a while.

As long as you can get your product into a box with less than 140 characters, your marketing team will be #Winning

Questions:

Back when twitter first started, and people understood Twitter better, users would update all their followers on their every move, i.e. “I just ate a slice of pizza and it was great.” Did you ever succumb to this kind of so called snapshot tweeting?
What is your favorite account you follow on Twitter and why? What is your favorite business that you follow on Twitter and why?
Do you personally use Twitter more for fun, or do you stick to serious matters?
Twitter use has dropped off significantly recently, and it’s growth rate has stalled. Why do you think that is? Do you think Twitter will respond with more ads to make up for this loss of users?
Twitter has discussed increasing the character limit for a tweet. Do you think this is a good idea or a bad one?