With its system of exchanging short messages in real time, public by default and relayable by "followers", the microblogging application Twitter offers a unique style of communication. After individuals, pioneering companies have started using this new social media to support their marketing strategies. Successfully, as long as they act with care and respect a number of fundamental principles.
1You've probably heard of Twitter, a microblogging service that allows users to send and read short messages of up to 140 characters. These messages, called 'tweets', can be received and sent from your computer or mobile phone. Twitter has only been around for five years, but has already become a major player in the social media industry. On average, since its inception, the number of registered users on Twitter has grown by 1,500%, the number of employees by 500%, and more than 70,000 applications have been created for the microblogging platform. These figures have not escaped the attention of major web players such as Facebook and Google, who have reportedly tried to buy Twitter, even going so far as to offer $500 million.
2 Such success is surprising: the possibility of sending messages limited to 140 characters is not very exciting in the digital world, with its webcams and live applications. However, the exponential growth of Twitter could have been predicted by looking at the phenomenon of the short message service, aka SMS. This service, which is included in every mobile phone, has also been an unexpected success, taking everyone by surprise. Few people had foreseen the rise of a service that was objectively not very easy to use. Moreover, there had been virtually no promotion of SMS by the telephone operators.
3 The difference between an SMS and a tweet is that an SMS is addressed by one individual to another, whereas Twitter allows for much wider communication. People can spread news in real time to all interested parties via a single message. Nothing spectacular at first sight, but this possibility has far-reaching consequences.
4What happened when the news of Michael Jackson's death on 25 June 2009 started to spread provides a good example. People rushed to Google to check the authenticity of the rumour but, to their surprise, they found nothing. Google's algorithm interpreted the flood of searches for the same keyword as a simple attack and blocked all queries, in accordance with its standard protocols. Some time later, Google realised the problem, and tried to fix it. At that point, the search engine was indeed indicating that Michael Jackson had indeed died... on 30 August 2007, by referring to an English author of the same name. It took several hours for the correct information to finally appear on Google, as any user would expect. At the same time, Twitter was full of posts discussing the death of the American pop star in real time, only hours after the event had actually occurred. With its short, but real-time posts, Twitter was ahead of Google that day.
5 Twitter's emphasis on immediate news updates is interesting not only for users, but also for brands: more and more companies are starting to use Twitter as a means of communication. The food retailer Whole Foods Market, the e-commerce company Zappos, the low-cost airline Jet Blue Airways, the IT company Dell or the famous coffee chain Starbucks have their own Twitter accounts, followed by thousands of customers and used for marketing research, communication and customer services.
6Before analysing how companies use Twitter in their marketing strategy, let's go back to some theoretical foundations of social media in general and microblogging in particular, as well as the rules to follow in order to use the tool successfully.
7Microblogs, as part of the wider social media sphere, have characteristics that explain their success.
8A specific type of social media. Twitter is part of the broad group of social media, including well-known sites like Facebook, YouTube or Second Life [1][1]1 A. M. Kaplan, "Second Life: Lessons for the Real World", .... Most of us have heard the term "social media", but there is still a lot of confusion among professionals and researchers about what is meant by this term, and how it differs from related concepts such as Web 2.0 or user generated content (UGC), which are frequently equated with it. As far back as 1979, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis of Duke University created Usenet, a global discussion system, which allowed Internet users to post public messages.
