Steven Pinckney

Twitter is the newest kid on the social networking block and it seems to be overtaking the pack. Like its predecessors–MySpace & FaceBook, Twitter started with a small counter-culture user base. With the simplicity of the tool (think Google meets chat), it spread virally through small networks and communities.

Twitter apparently peaked about a year ago but has suddenly witnessed increased growth in the Spring of 2009. In fact, I was one of these users that decided to get on the Tweet-wagon. On a whim, while watching Larry King interview Ashton Kutcher and Sean “Diddy” Combs about Twitter, I decided to sign up for an account myself. After less than 5 minutes I had signed up for an account using my favourite moniker -“WorldsLocalYank” and posted my first “tweet.”

Within five days I had begun following 7 people and even somehow acquired 9 followers, including my step-mother, my cousin, a few close friends and some random people. The interesting thing is this: all of my friends that I am now connected with had also “spontaneously” logged onto Twitter for the first time this week.

Whether it is because celebrities like Ashton Kutcher (the first user to achieve 1 million followers, ahead of CNN) and Oprah Winfrey have begun to Twitter or because the message has finally reached the masses about the simplicity of convenience of Twitter is unknown, but the ubiquity of twitter cannot be missed. What is known however is that businesses and organizations have taken note of the potential of Twitter to reach hundreds of thousands of consumers instantly. On any given day in the Twitter nation, you can receive breaking news stories, promotion announcements and even gubernatorial candidacy announcements. With the sudden increase in popularity, and the variety of uses available for it, Twitter appears poised to become a more sophisticated direct mail tool.

Twitter makes for an exceptional direct marketing tool for a few reasons. First, it is easy to identify a market segment in Twitter nation. Tweets can be “hash-tagged” with keywords. These keywords allow an organization to search for tweets tagged with these keywords. Having retrieved a universe of tweets regarding a particular topic, it is then very easy to send messages to the originators of these tweets either manually or via a computer program. The latter is possible because of a second feature, the Twitter Application Programming Interface (API). Put briefly, an API is a component that computer programmers can embed in their own creations that allow their programs to participate in Twitter Nation. The programs developed by these programmers can receive and even send Tweets by using this API. The uses of this are limited only by the imaginations of the programmers. The “hash-tagged” keywords feature that allows organizations to find members who fit into a market segment can also allow these organizations to measure the effectiveness of campaigns and announcements by using any number of the freely-available tools to measure the “buzz” about a certain topic.

Twitter is not new, but it has sparked a new way of communicating between individuals and their peers, as well as organizations and their target market segments. The potential of Twitter as a marketing tool is still in its infancy, but with the ability to cleanly and quickly identify a target market segment, send key messages these target segments, and measure the buzz about a particular topic such as an advertising spot or product name before and after messages are sent, it is clear that Twitter can play a significant role in an Integrated Marketing Communications style campaign.

Follow me on Twitter - WorldsLocalYank. Do you Tweet?

Graphic Credit:
Sabrina Segal