What’s up with Twitter?

Guy Kawasaki can’t live without it. And he said it’s the most powerful branding mechanism since TV. It’s being compared with Youtube. And it’s even being considered a threat to google. (You can read about it here and here.)

With Twitter’s massive growth at 752% in 2008, there are no ways that you can ignore its existence.

So what exactly is Twitter? You don’t need to look far for an explanation. People are so excited about twitter that they have slide presentation, a video and even a blog ( in fact, there are 2 of them) dedicated just to talk about how to twitter. And of course, there are people who have a different opinion about it as well.

I have a twitter account since early last year. Same with lots of people, I’m clueless about it and I even doubts it’s usefulness at first. And I didn’t really use it until only recently. Because I’m not really a chatty person and I don’t really know how to communicate with strangers whom I never met before, my twitter update is still at less than 500 even though I have in there for a long time.

Well, here are my thoughts on using twitter so far:

1) Two way communication

Maybe my follower base is still not big enough or twitter is still very much a American things, the 2-way communication doesn’t really happen to me. Usually, out of the 10 times that I asked a question, only 2 times that I get a reply.

In a way, twitter is a kind of a very gigantic closed community. You have to make lots of noise by twittering constantly. But at the same time, your twitter need to be smart and contribute, in some way, to your followers before people would really response to your twitter.

2) Quality of the people whom you are following

If you don’t want nonsensical stuff in your tweets, choose wisely at the people you are following. But you do not want to choose only CEO of some companies to follow. Commoners do provide fresh ideas and views which may be interesting. Here’s my 30 sec take on choosing my followers or you can check this and this on following people.

They bother to take time to fill up their profile section
They have interesting site
Their tweets are not about selling products
They have avatar

There are also companies which have twitter accounts as well. Some companies are using it to get feedbacks, to address issue relating to their PR and sometime, to inform followers of their attractive promotion that they have.

3) Number of people following you

Did I tell you that it’s all a number game? I suspected that the reason why twitter is so successful is because of the word ‘follower’. Well, it looks cool to have tons of followers. And for some, it’s one of their objectives or even their main objective to gain as many followers as possible.

I can tell you that as more and more people are using twitter as a marketing tool, you will get more unsolicited tweets to gain more followers.

No doubts that twitter will continue to grow but for how long. Will it have the same fate as secondlife? No one know for now and it will be interesting to see how it span out and also what kind of next big thing will take over twitter? But for the time being, everyone love twitter.

P.S You can check out my delicious bookmarks (look under the tag ‘twitter’) for all the things that I gathered from twitter about twitter.

If not, here are some more tips on using it and also books and interview on it as well.