What's all the Twitter about Twitter?

Chances are you have heard the term “Twitter” in the last month or so. The term refers to the social networking website and service Twitter.com. In addition -- and possibly in part -- to increased celebrity use and TV News and national newspaper reports, Twitter.com grew 1382% year over year. In fact, with roughly 6 million monthly visitors, Twitter.com now ranks as the third largest social network behind MySpace and Facebook.

But if you haven’t heard of Twitter just yet, don’t feel too bad. Most of their growth is relatively new. Although Twitter is three years old, 70% of Twitter users joined in 2008.

Twitter's quick rise to popularity has placed it front and center in many marketing manager's minds. Before we discuss how Twitter can help your business, let's first better understand what exactly Twitter is.

What is Twitter?

Simply put, Twitter enables its users to send and receive other users' short text messages (known as tweets). Users can allow others to receive these tweets or may subscribe to receive others' tweets (called following). If both users follow each other, they can then send private tweets to one another (called direct messages).

Part of the attraction of Twitter is that users can send and receive tweets from many different locations other than the twitter.com website. In fact, most messages are sent through the following methods:

• SMS text messages to/from their mobile phones
• Third-party mobile phone applications (e.g. TwitterFon)
• Third-party desktop computer applications (e.g. TweetDeck).
• RSS feeds (for receiving tweets only)

Next post we will discuss if your business should consider Twitter.