At first glance it might not seem like much, but this micro-blogging platform has grown exponentially in its three years and has comfortably carved a niche for itself in the *corporate, *political and *social industries. Due to its very nature, it has also relatively easily established itself as a news portal with breaking news stories by citizen journalists and *news portals alike.
Some corporate accounts serve as a PR tool that only tweet links to recent press releases and do not really engage fully with their audience. There are however others that have found interesting, inventive ways to engage with their customers on Twitter.
Leveraging the platform
The release of the Twitter Application Programming Interface (API) has made it more accessible for companies to tie-in larger online marketing strategies with this platform.
According to statistics by Twitter, their active users have increased 900% in the last year and their APIs receive almost twice as much traffic than the website. Interacting with Twitter over SMS is also getting more popular every day.
Under a thousand applications have been launched thus far including Hahlo (a popular iPhone Twitter client), Twirl (a Twitter desktop client), Twitpic (an app that lets users share photos on Twitter) and Digsby (an application that centralises e-mail, IM and social networking accounts into one desktop program) to name a few.
The possibilities for leveraging this platform are endless. For companies one example in which to leverage the platform in addition to using it as a PR and engagement tool would be to use it in conjunction to a competition perhaps, tying in website, email and sms functionality.
A few other examples of using Twitter for business include most importantly customer service or relationship management. Managing your reputation and engage with your audience. It will certainly make your brand stronger. You can also create applications that will repost blog feeds automatically, collect leads, promote events, manage a poll, schedule post-dated tweets and act as a forum.
With a growing user-base and corporate adoption the platform may launch iterations on revenue products within this year, but Twitter will remain free to use by everyone.
FormFunction Digital Consultants are well experienced with creating and integrating innovative applications with websites or social elements and have previous experience in the OpenSocial, LinkedIn API, Facebook API as well as Twitter API.
About the Author
FormFunction Digital Consultants advise, develop and execute innovative technology strategies and techniques through a variety of online platforms. Assisting businesses to successfully engage with targeted consumers, services include bespoke web development, ecommerce solutions, social network application and mobi-site development.
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