Marketing with Twitter

Twitter (see www.twitter.com) is a type of blogging tool that focuses on extremely short messages. Its akin to a blog that is only one sentence long. The maximum length of a twitter post is 140 characters.

People have been mostly using the technology to post “What I am doing now” type information. Some examples of twitter messages (known affectionately as tweets):

• “I’m at SXSW today”
• “Eating lunch, clam chowder”
• “Has anyone heard about kijiji? http://www.kijiji.ca/ Really cool.”

So you know I assume how blogging can be used to market to your current or potential future customers. But can you market over twitter with such small messages? You sure can.

The most common type of marketing over twitter happens with a conversation. On twitter, its very easy to follow other people. So I can subscribe to your twitter feed, another persons, and perhaps even subscribe to hundreds of peoples feeds. Then when Robert posts “Has anyone seen this cool thing?”, I can post “@Robert: yep, its cool. did you try the other thing?” And Robert can see that and respond “@Scott: oh wow, didn’t know that. thx”.

And basically everyone who subscribes to Roberts feed and to my feed can see this conversation.

The marketing happens because you can encourage personal and short responses to your posts. Its not cumbersome as email, blog posts, blog comments, etc. It’s short and concise, and can even be done as a text message from or too your cell phone because its the perfect size for something like that.

So from the corproate perspective, you can post a short question to your customers, and watch their short answers roll in. Or post a thought or link, and watch other peoples thoughts and links come back to you. And that can happen on a truly huge scale, because of the lightweightness of it. Robert Scoble currently watches about 5000 people on twitter, and has that many watching him.

I don’t think he could read 5000 RSS blogs, or 5000 emails, or almost any other form of conversation in a day. And even if he did, could he also be an active participant in so many too?