iA

On Twitter

by trevor. Average Reading Time: about a minute.

 

I had never used twitter much until the last few days and I am getting quite into it.  I think it is a great tool for the following reasons:

  • Communicating with friends and colleagues.  By using twitter, you can broadcast your activities to an interested audience, promoting activities such as blogging or speaking engagements.
  • Adding interactivity to a blog or other online profile.  Writing a blog post takes time, but updating your status is easy.  By adding a status box to your blog will add more frequently updated content
  • Updating status across multiple social networks (see below)

Some businesses including eBay are using twitter as a communication tool.  I note however that eBay has less than 100 followers.

One of the reasons why I hadn’t used Twitter previously was that I thought that it would be too time consuming to publish regular updates.  However I have discovered some shortcuts to automate some of the publishing.

Integration with Facebook and MySpace

Using the Facebook Twitter app, Facebook status and tweeks can be synced so that one will update the other.  There is also a wordpress plugin for updating myspace status.  This obviously means that you can use twitter to create a single status across all your social network profiles 

Integrate with Blogs

Using a service such as twitterfeed, when you post to your blog a tweet will appear on your twitter feed.  This is a great way of publicising your blog to people following your twitter feed.

If you found this post useful, why not buy me a coffee!

  • http://www.vzaar.com vzaar Jamie

    Nice post Trevor. The eBay UK use of twitter to date is rather lame to date as it merely pulls in the headlines that are announced on the UK’s Announcement Board. Anyone with an RSS for that page (eg many UK PowerSellers) will simply be getting duplicate notices.

    What would be great, and a great strain on Customer Support resources, is to have a feed that updates sellers on site issues, bug releases etc. When there is a problem with Turbo Lister as an example the calls and emails into the Dublin Customer Support centre spike with obvious implications on resources. Being able to deflect queries and to guide people in the right direction with twitter would be an excellent, and cheap, alternative tactic. Whether they adopt such a 3rd party application remains to be seen.

    At vzaar we are using it on our Contact Us page to address just the very same issue I’ve outline above. You can see that here:
    http://www.vzaar.com/contact

  • http://www.cashbackatebay.com Mette @ cashbackatebay

    Trevor, you wrote ” Some businesses including eBay are using twitter as a communication tool. I note however that eBay has less than 100 followers.”

    Why do you suppose there’s not much of a following on eBay?

  • http://www.vzaar.com vzaar Jamie

    1. Because twitter is new and therefore not many people have (a) heard of it and (b) downloaded it outside of techie circles

    2. Because eBay has done little to advertise this twitter feed. There is no reference to it on eBay. I heard of it via an ex colleague

    3. Because the content at the moment is simply recycling of the Announcements Board. It’s like using a twitter feed to publicise your own blog post. That’s what RSS is for.

  • http://www.tweet-sql.com Rhys

    I’ve just released an app called Tweet-SQL intended to help with Twitter Integration for businesses.

  • http://cogito.faii.net Tristan

    wow. that’s informative.

    But after trying it out i found it irritating that all and sundry i tweeted ended up on facebook.

    however, if you need another way that allows you to choose which tweets end up on your facebook check out this app:

    http://apps.facebook.com/selectivetwitter/

    If need be, i’ve found a tutorial here:

    http://cogito.faii.net/linking-facebook-to-twitter-tutorial/

    cheers :)