Microblogging: Twitter

Seitzhan Madiyev

The Information Technology industry has been surprising us slightly. After the creation of Google search engine and the “internet bubble” crisis in 2000s, it began developing a little bit slower and in different direction than many expected. People were predicting about future IT industry; how it will change the way we live. As the time has passed trends that were predicted in that time did not achieve their expectations, or simply did not get enough attention from the community. But instead other projects came into place; those which most of the people did not even think about ten years ago, but without which a lot of people cannot imagine their lives nowadays. The top trend of this decade was given to a group of products that can be called “social networks”. And between monstrous creation of Mark Zuckerberg and a huge failure of “MySpace” there was one more invention which I believe will have an even greater impact in the nearest future “Twitter”.

How it works
Twitter is a simple microblogging service which allows users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters. When a user wants to read public messages sent by another user of his interest, he/she simply connects to it through a button named “follow”. And those who follow the user will get all the messages sent by him. It was firstly described by its creators as a service that uses SMS to tell small groups what you are doing. When people create an account there, the site simply asks you to share with others “What are you doing?”.

Socio-political significance
Twitter was often criticized for uselessness since its users were bringing a lot of “rubbish” and meaningless information, like “I ate a sandwich”. However, since 2008 the project took an important socio-political significance. In February 16, 2008 the photographer James Buck was arrested by Egyptian police. He wrote “arrested” in his twitter account which quickly came to the US authorities. The next day he was released. During the U.S. presidential elections Twitter was actively used by both candidates Barack Obama and John McCain for their campaigns. It was blocked in many countries for the purpose of not spreading information of some events.
When the management team understood the importance of their service, they have changed the business model the question has been changed to “What’s happening?”. The society started to realize the importance of the project. It became the fastest media platform to release the latest news and updates on almost all events occurring in the world. Now even media outlets are forced to get the newest information from Twitter with the risk of reporting false information. It has become the most efficient media platform, since all people who have an account there have become the reporters.

A lot of people argue that most of the messages that occur in twitter are so called “Pointless Babble”. So the research has been made to analyze what people actually share with others, and the results were interesting. Pointless Babble won with 40.55% of the total tweets captured; however, Conversational was a very close second at 37.55%, and Pass-Along Value was third (albeit a distant third) at 8.7% of the tweets captured. (Twitter Study) Pass-Along Value is the messages that actually matter; those are the newest news, relevant information and shares of interesting thoughts by famous politicians, business people, etc. Although it is only 8.7%, but it is still large in general terms since around 200 million tweets are sent every day.

New business model
Twitter has created an absolutely new way for businesses to promote their products and for people to promote themselves. Since 2000s marketing has been moving more and more towards the Internet, and just few years ago so called “social networks” helped to create new business models and increase the efficiency of marketing. One of the most important tools created because of social network is the “target marketing”. It simply allows businesses to find the right audience to promote to dividing all the users by different groups. But if social networks like Facebook are efficient platform for targeting adverts, how Twitter has created a new way? It is simple: “Brand Journalism”.

Nowadays adverts don’t get enough attention from public and become less and less efficient, and that is where brand journalism might come in the nearest future. Brand journalism was created as a tool to promote products and companies in an innovative way. A company can hire a professional journalist which can write only about this company, its everyday activities, new products, the chronicles of what has happened. People are interested to hear new stories, and Twitter is an ideal platform to tell those stories, to share photos and links.

I believe that Twitter has not achieved its peak yet, and it has more to come in the future. From being on of the most innovative products of these years, it might become an essential part of our lives.

References

1. MG Siegler. Russian President Medvedev Sends His First Tweet At Twitter. — TechCrunch, 23.06.2010
2. Chris Nuttall. What’s happening? A lot, says Twitter COO. — The Financial Times Tech blog (blogs.ft.com/techblog), 20.11.2009
3. Twitter: "pointless babble" or peripheral awareness + social grooming? — Danah Boyd blog (www.zephoria.org), 16.08.2009
4. Owen Fletcher, Dan Nystedt. Internet, Twitter Blocked in China City After Ethnic Riot. — PC World, 06.06.2009
5. Om Malik. A Brief History of Twitter. — Gigaom.com, 01.02.2009
6. BBC admits it made mistakes using Mumbai Twitter coverage. — The Guardian, 05.12.2008
7. Claudine Beaumont. New York plane crash: Twitter breaks the news, again. — The Telegraph, 16.01.2009
8.  John Brandon. Barack Obama wins Web 2.0 race. — ComputerWorld, 19.08.2008
9. Twitter Study. — Pear Analytics. — August 2009