I've been using twitter now for about a month. You can find me tweeting about internet marketing @WebMarkAdelaide and I recently starting also tweeting for @SuperPlayCafe as well.
My impression of twitter before I started using it was that it was pretty much a tool that was made up of only facebook status updates. I couldn't have been more wrong. It reminds me of being in a chatroom. Twitter is like a world wide chatroom where you can filter the chats you want to receive, ie. the people, searches and lists that you follow.
@TaschaD posted a summary of a conversation she started on twitter about how the Sausages sold at the Clipsal 500 aren't made in SA. This will give you an idea of how a conversation on twitter can grow and change and jump to different networks like its an organism... its very exciting.
Here are some thoughts on twitter based on my experiences so far:
Differences Between Twitter & Facebook:
- Twitter is faster- you can be posting updates 30 times per day and thats perfectly acceptable. If you're away for a few hours, you can miss hundreds of relevant tweets that you will never see again unless you go back and look for them.
- Twitter is more organic- the twitter community interacts in a very organic way where trends and new ways of doing things emerge naturally, where as the use of facebook is very structured just the way M. Zuck wants it.
- Twitter is simpler- the microblogging platform is much simpler than facebook with most additional functionality added by external applications.
- Its easier to get more followers on twitter than fans/friends on facebook- all you need to do is join in the conversation and if what you offer is useful and interesting then people will start following you.
- A little more viral than facebook- 'ReTweeting' seems like a much more common practice on twitter than 'sharing' does on facebook.
Twitter for Business
- Great for networking- I've found it much better than linkedin for networking (more about this in future post).
- Industry Updates/Articles/info- It takes the place of Google Reader for me in many ways as I can get article recommendations from those I follow instead of getting them based on the blogs and sites I follow.
Twitter for Personal
- Many of the people I follow mix personal tweets with professional tweets and still keep it interesting (although I have unfollowed people who post a lot of personal tweets which I'm not interested in).
- Somehow those mundane sounding tweets about what you're eating for lunch don't seem so mundane after all, although I'm sure they would be if that's all you tweeted about.
- For me Twitter is still primarily a business tool.
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