This is the second in a series of posts review various social media sites.  In this post I’ll be focusing on Twitter.  All you wanted to know about things that you didn’t know you wanted to know about in 140 characters or less.

I’ve heard a lot of mixed reviews of twitter.  Some people love it.  Others write it off as nothing but the ramblings of self-interested 20 somethings – therefore nothing of interest for businesses.  I’ve seen a mix of results.

From a demographics standpoint, Twitter does tend to skew younger according to Pew.  With the largest percentage of their audience under the age of 30.  But it has seen great growth in the older demographics and higher household income in recent years.

At the very least, like Facebook, its a discovery tool and a communication tool.  Its also pretty simple to use.  Text, image, link (shortened) click the tweet button, voila, its out there.  There aren’t a whole bunch of different post types like you would find at Facebook.  Just the Tweet.

From a business standpoint, its a great announcement tool for content such as sales, events, trainings, webinars, etc.  You can’t get all of the vital stats in a tweet.  But you can easily tease the info and provide a link to the full information on your site.  Retweets spread your information really fast.

The flip side is that content is really short lived on Twitter.  If you thought a post might disappear fast on Facebook, posts get buried on an active twitter stream blazingly fast.  So optimizing the timing of your posts and finding creative ways to get the same information out there without boring people is important.

Another really nice feature of Twitter is the fact that it plays really well with others.  Where Facebook really wants to be the main source for your efforts to rule the world, Twitter is content to play nicely with everybody.  It has direct integration with Facebook.  So it is easy to configure tweets to immediately post as updates on Facebook.

From a third party standpoint, the social tools I offer to my customers plus other services such as IFTTT, Hootsuite, and Hubspot allow businesses to post to multiple social sites from a single interface.

Twitter is also a great place to engage prospective customers if you are in an industry that people like to post about.  Because all tweets are public by default as opposed to their direct messaging tools, you can create keyword based searches and engage those posters with a solicitation for their business.  For example if somebody tweets out to their friends – Anybody got any good ideas for dinner tonight?  A restaurant could find that and respond back with a special offer or just throw their name in the hat for consideration.

Just try not be come off like a creepy stalker.

To find out more about how to make the most of your time with Social Media, contact MS Digital Solutions for a FREE Digital Footprint Analysis and to discuss our full range of digital marketing services.