What the Tweet?

For those that know me I'm a bit obsessed with Twitter. One phrase that I hear quite often is "I don't get Twitter" or "Why would I want to know what you had for lunch" etc. I'm going to break up some of the questions that many people have about this wierd and wonderful 140 character world.

"How it does it work?"

Twitter itself is nothing more than small 140 character messages called tweets. Each user has an account through which they can subscribe to or "Follow" other people, and other users can follow you. Every word in a tweet becomes a searchable keyword. That is all.

From a social perspective by following your friends you get little snapshots into another person's life, be it their interests, places they like to eat, or the awesome things they just did. It's great for keeping in touch with friends that you don't see too often, or reading the thoughts of somebody interesting. You can chat with other people by mentioning their username with an "@" in front. On the Twitter homepage next to the "Sign Up Now" it says "Join the conversation", twitter allows users to share their experiences, thoughts and opinions.

"So it's just like facebook?"

The most powerful feature in twitter which differentiates itself, is the search engine. Every string of characters in a tweet is publicly searchable. Twitter.com utilises this to identify what the most popular keywords are at any time and they usually reflect the most popular discussion topic. Sometimes this can have hilarious effects like when the City of Sydney had a blackout, one of the trending topics on twitter was #zombies. A more useful aspect of this is when there are train delays, it's quicker to search for "cityrail" on twitter and see what others are complaining about than to find out from the announcements on the train itself.

"Why is this thing not *$&#‽@` working"

During Research Topics 1 I was complaining out aloud about how the journal search engine Scopus worked. I unexpectedly received a reply, explaining that Scopus is a indexing engine and access to full articles is the uni's responsibility. Any organisation can search for keywords on their product and not only gauge their users experience be it positive or negative, but can also reply and provide support. (The scopus account has since been reset, so the archived tweet has disappeared)

"Hey check this out it's awesome"

One of the strongest aspects of "Social Media" is the idea of sharing knowledge. Many people tweet because they want to share their experiences with the world. This could be an awesome restaurant they just ate at which has cheap seafood, a funny video that they just saw or a new computer that they just bought. It's this idea of sharing which makes Twitter so interesting to marketers.

"Staying in the loop"

Twitter has become a marketer's heaven, most organisations have twitter accounts for public relations but also to promote their products and services. Many companies have their twitter pages announcing events and job openings, usually linking back to their recruitment page or their company blog. You can find the list of sponsors that support BIT/ISM at twitter.com/UNSW_BITSA/sponsors.

"Free stuff"

Most importantly for us students, is the free giveaways. In the winter Levi's had a promotion called iSpyLevis (twitter.com/ispylevis). A person would walk around tweeting cryptic clues or pictures of their whereabouts and the challenge was to find them and ask "Are those Levi's you're wearing" and you'd win a free pair of $200 Levi's. When IMAX launched their twitter profile (twitter.com/IMAXSydney) They gave away $21 vouchers to every person who "ReTweeted (RT)" and shared with their friends that IMAX was giving away $21 vouchers. I walked away with a free movie, gelato and sashimi dinner.

All of this is just skimming the top of the many ways that you can use twitter. So if you haven't signed up already, join the conversation, follow the UNSW_BITSA account, and find out for yourselves how useful and entertaining it can be.