Embracing Twitter as a Business Tool  ¹

Posted by Kuljit to General on May 22nd, 2009  

I’ve always been skeptical about social networking sites.  Out of my colleagues and friends I was last to get a MySpace page (now gone) and the last to get a Facebook page. Neither really captured my imagination. I’ve only recently joined Twitter and really really enjoy it, it’s a great way to keep in touch with friends and family as most people already know. I use Twitter a lot more than I do Facebook and MySpace. Funnily enough Facebook have also introduced a micro-blogging tool in their interface to try and steal some of the action from Twitter.

It’s also great for business. Twitter’s growth statistics speak for themselves. Nielsen Online reported recently that in the past 12 months Twitter grew by 1,689% from February 2008 to February 2009. That’s an amazing amount. To go from 100,000 users to 1.78 million speaks volumes. The visitor stats make compelling reading. In less than 3 years they've become the third most visited social networking site in the United States of America. I remember not so long ago there were stories on the internet of disgruntled staff leaving Twitter for a variety of reasons. Some might remember Blaine Cook departed because of service reliability issues. That was big news back then and it looked certain that Twitter was going to implode.

Yes I know, this is another blog post on the interweb about Twitter but instead of me telling you how good it is and why everyone should be using it, I’m going to describe something that happened to me over Twitter recently which left me impressed, surprised and slightly confused at the same time. Continue reading