An introduction to Twitter…

Not using Twitter as part of your social media marketing? Our 3 minute guide gives you the basics, and shows why Twitter marketing is the #1 activity for social media marketing. Powerful, and so simple to use that any business can extend their potential customer base through Twitter marketing as part of their social media strategy.

Why we have created this video

Have you found yourself asking the question, what is Twitter?  Well you’re not along and many of our clients ask the same question. This is a plain English video introduction to Twitter, encompassing ‘what it is’ and how you can use it for personal or business use. This brief introduction explains twitter’s origins, terminology, and covers what you can expect to get out of the world’s most popular micro-blog turned social network service. A must for anyone considering using twitter for their business or personal use, and a concise explanation of what the service can offer you. If you found this tutorial helpful then please click the Like or Tweet button below or leave a comment. Remember to watch this space as we will be releasing a range of social media marketing video tutorials over the coming months.

Video Transcription

Hi there, guys. Thanks for joining me. Now in this video I wanted to briefly discuss what Twitter actually is and how it functions. Now it started originally back in 2006 as a Micro blogging platform, which basically means it’s a platform for people to share information and have bite sized, more condensed and manageable conversations; rather than those big, lengthy ones that you get on Facebook and things like My Space. So it’s really designed as a communication platform, and it’s also integrated and become more like a social network by adding things like photos and also things like videos. Now the great thing about Twitter is that it is concise so you get 140 characters by which to communicate to people. It was created by four guys in California – four dudes in California, Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Evan Williams and Biz Stone – and they wanted to create a service that was different to Facebook or My Space and that didn’t take a lot of people’s time. Now it’s based around the idea of asymmetrical following, which basically means that I can follow you but you don’t have to follow me. And it’s become very popular with journalists and celebrities, people like Ashton Kutcher, Justin Bieber and more recently Charlie Sheen, unfortunately. So the beauty of Twitter is its simplicity. So if you think of a text message where you have a very limited amount of space to communicate with people, and Twitter is exactly the same. There’s only 140 characters but with those 140 characters you’re able to send out posts or tweets, as they’re know, and you’re able to have them be searched by people by using the hash tags. To use a hash tag and key word within your tweet and people can then search for those topics or interests that are related to them. Now why would anyone want to use Twitter? Well if you’re using it for personal use you’re able to have conversations, and very interesting conversations across a wide spectrum of interests and topics. You have trending topics that are on there, which are key words or topics that people are discussing most often on Twitter. But if you’re a business you’re able to tap into a huge network of people, and it’s currently at about 500 million users, and has pretty much 11 people joining per second, which is absolutely staggering. So if you’re a business and you want to reach out to a target audience, or maybe you want to sort of tap in to your current customer base, you’re able to do so. You’re able to have conversations in real time, maybe use your phone to send out a tweet, or maybe use a computer. But the power of it is really the viral nature of Twitter. Twitter really enables you to send that information, have people syndicate it, or retweet it our to their followers. So it’s absolutely powerful and really, really simple to use. Now if you’re new to social networks as a whole, Twitter is probably one of the best ones you can get started with and kind of get to grips with it. It uses terminology such as “following” and “followers”, “retweet” and again, “hash tags” and things like that. But it is generally a very simple network to use and you can really have some fantastic conversations. So if you’ve not used it yet I suggest getting on board and following us at Opace.web, and we look forward to receiving your tweets. I’ll speak to you soon.