Twitter

The Journey of Twitter

The Journey of Twitter

Introduction

The unprecedented growth of social media has changed the way businesses operate. As a successful organization, each business wants to get it noticed and develop a better understanding of its consumers. Social media have changed the marketing, advertising, PR, promotion and research dynamics for businesses. It has an impact on business processes, systems and communication. Social media presence has become mandatory, and more companies are convinced of the benefits accrued from it. The Social Media Marketing Industry Report for the year 2011 presents interesting statistics to reaffirm the claim made above. Social media have affected the society world over. When used effectively, social media increases traffic on the website, improves sales, generates customer interest in the company and its products and reduces cost of marketing.

Social networking industry is one the most growing industry in the world (Catharine 2008, pp.3). Twitter also falls under the social networking service. The company provides microblogging services, where customers/users can read and send text posts. These messages are known as tweets and one message can contain up to 140 characters. The service was initiated in March 2006 and it was commercialized in July 2006, by Jack Dorsey. The service became very popular among users, and by 2011, it had gained around 300 million users worldwide. These customers have generated around 310 million tweets, the number of search queries are around 1.5 billion per day. This growth has asserted twitter as the SMS of the Internet. The company is located at San Francisco. Additional offices and servers are located in San Antonio. The idea of twitter is a re4sult of brainstorming session conducted by board members of Odeo, a podcasting firm. The idea of SMS as communication tool was given by Dorsey. Odeo used the first prototype of this idea for internal communication with employees, while, the full version was publically launched in July 2006 (Arrington 2006, pp.1).

Products and Services

There are many valuable service and applications provided by Twitter. These services enhance the capability of microblogging and the applications are very easy to use. There are various objectives of each service. Some services are designed to accessibility; others are designed to improve functionality. There are services which give users platform to create complex tweets and there are simple SMS services.

B-to-b marketers are still deciding if Promoted Tweets should be part of social media mix. Twitter's new Promoted Tweets ad platform, announced last month, lets advertisers pay for tweets that appear at die top of search pages on Twitter.com. The tweets, based on keywords on which advertisers bid, can be retweeted by Twitter users to their own followers, just like ordinary Twitter posts.

"We wanted to do something that enhances the conversation that companies are already having with their customers on Twitter, (Maddox 2010, pp.29) " said Dick Costólo, chief operating officer at Twitter, who announced die service at die Ad Age Digital Conference in New York last month, hosted by B-to-B sibling publication Advertising ...