Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send “updates” (or “tweets”; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via short message service (e.g. on a cell phone), instant messaging, or a third-party application such as Twitterrific or Facebook.
- From Wikipedia
Commoncraft also has a pretty good explanation of what twitter is on youtube.
Here’s another way to look at it that might also help you better understand what a microblog is.
If someone likes someone else’s blog, they can subscribe to it’s RSS feed via some third party service like Google Reader. You can subscribe to as many blogs as you want and they are all funnelled down into one stream of posts for easy sorting and reading. Now what if there was a maximum character limit on your blog posts and you eliminated the third party service to subscribe to feeds. Woila, we have a microblog.
Through Twitter, you can subscribe to other Twitter users accounts. Other people can also subscribe to your account.
Why should I be on Twitter?
There are a bunch of reasons why your company should be on Twitter.
- Establish your expertise
- Market your services
- Network with other individuals
- Stay on top of industry news
The best part is that it is a lot less time consuming than traditional blogging because of the 140 character limit.
This post is part of the Magicomm series “Printer Tweet Tips“. To keep up to date on other posts in this series, don’t forget to subscribe to the blog feed.
Comments
I have been asked to start a twitter account and I appreciate the concise explanation of what it is all about.