7 Things You Did Not Know About Twitter

by    |   19th Apr 10 1:15 am   |   21

Twitter Bird Talks Business 7 Things You Did Not Know About TwitterHow can a micro-blogging service with messages limited to 140 characters boost your business? There is no pleasing background audio and there’s no support to promote your business through sales videos. All you get is a one page profile and the capability to ‘tweet’. Despite, these limitations, why is Twitter regarded as one of the best social networking tools for businesses?

Massive Reach

Till date, Twitter has more than 105,779,710 registered users and a whopping 300,000 new users sign up per day. No other social network (be it Facebook, Myspace or others) can match the number of users joining the twitter bandwagon with every passing day. Twitter receives 180 million unique visitors per month

Worldwide Appeal

Nearly 60% twitter traffic comes from outside United States. The popularity of most social networks is limited to countries or continents at best. Myspace is popular in United States but it’s hardly even heard of in Asia Pacific. Similarly, Orkut dominates India and Brazil but is considered outdated in Europe and the US. Facebook is the closest competitor to Twitter in terms of worldwide reach. On the other hand, Twitter is a ubiquitous phenomenon.

Anywhere, Anytime

One of the major reasons for the astonishing popularity of Twitter is the easy access. You can access it from your phone, directly through twitter website or through any of the third-party twitter applications.

It is amazing that 75% of Twitter traffic comes from third-party applications and 60% of all tweets come from third-party apps.

Very Popular with Smartphone Users

Twitter is very popular amongst most smartphone users including Blackberry, iPhone and Symbian users. Since the new Blackberry application was launched, it has accounted for 7 to 8% of new traffic. Even before Twitter officially launched its app for smartphones, many third-party applications including UberTwitter have gained immense popularity amongst smartphone users.

Growing Company

While the Twitter service is popular all over the world, very little is known of the low key founders and their growing team. Twitter now has 175 employees, up from 25 one year ago. A large chunk of the Twitter team is working aggressively on enhancing the ‘business aspect’ of twitter and the results can be expected to arrive as early as the middle of this year.

Twitter is no longer a startup and a recent valuation indicates that the company is worth nearly $1 billion.

Business Focus

Twitter gets a whopping 600 million search queries on Twitter per day and nearly 10% of these are for business purpose. There are over 100,000 Twitter applications and nearly one third of these apps are aimed at promoting businesses and companies on Twitter.

Powerful API

The Twitter Engineering Team has developed a very powerful set of API which account for nearly 3 billion requests a day. To further strengthen its business portfolio offerings, Twitter is all set to launch a couple of new initiatives through its API

  • Promoted Tweets will let advertisers pay for sponsored tweets that appear at the top of search results for certain keywords.
  • Commercial Accounts will allow a business to pay for a Twitter account in return for detailed analytics tools and the ability for several people to post to the same account.

I hope that the next Twitter business success story is yours. Tweet your way to success!

Douglas Idugboe, Digital and New Media Marketing Strategist. Founder and Chief Editor of Smedio! A Canadian Bestselling Author, Marketing Strategist, Speaker and Trainer, Who Loves Technology
  • beckyweiand

    All very good points. We just started using Twitter at my company and we are seeing great success. We stay up-to-date on what is going on with our clients and what is going on in our industry plus the industries our clients are in!

  • http://www.loudable.com/ Loudable

    This blog is just amazing, first time landed here through SU and really liked it. keep up the good work.

  • http://www.holidayfirm.net Travel Guide

    Well,i am agree with your all view of twitter.Twitter really provides a huge accessible marketing targets

  • http://smedio.com Douglas Idugboe

    Staying ahead of the curve helps you keep your clients ahead of the curve as well. Thanks for the comment Becky.

  • http://smedio.com Douglas Idugboe

    Thanks Suhasini for those kind words! We really appreciate them.

  • vikas tailor

    Great post included with real essence

  • http://tgcgs.com/blog tgcgs

    Looking forward to the Twitter business accounts, I hadn't heard that one before reading this. Really enjoying your stuff guys, you've got a special space here – it's the only 'big' blog I read regularly that doesn't “patronise” the readership in any way – and I like that a lot.

  • Tyler

    I'm sorry but maybe you should have titled this article as “7 Things That The Entire World Already Knows About Twitter.” This is all fairly common knowledge to someone who has read any kind of article about Twitter in the past. Thank you for rehashing old information and trying to market it as new.

  • http://smedio.com Douglas Idugboe

    Thank Vikas.

  • http://smedio.com Douglas Idugboe

    Thanks for your compliments and very valuable feedback. We appreciate your continuous visits to Smedio.

  • http://smedio.com Douglas Idugboe

    Tyler, that's a great title we would greatly consider for a future post :) Thanks for your comment anyway. It helps us to know not everyone don't know about the things we mentioned in the article.

    Feel free to add more to these common knowledge, you would be surprised how useful they could be to most people. Thanks again for the comment!

  • JSPadovani

    According to my website analytics, Twitter is now my 5th largest source of traffic. Initially I signed up just because it seemed the thing to do, I'm now actively creating strategies to truly monazite this great free source of customers.

    Jeff

    http://www.BestHudsonValleyWeddingEver.com

  • http://www.geoffsnyder.com Geoff Snyder

    Doug,

    This is a great article about some of the key points of using Twitter and what it has to offer. I look forward to reading more from you about this. Thank you for contributing this for us to read.

    Regards,
    Geoff

  • http://smedio.com Douglas Idugboe

    We are glad you find the article very useful. Goeff, thanks for being part of the Smedio success. Looking forward to more of your comments and feedbacks.

  • Anand Subramanian

    Twitter works great !!! The phenomenon is that which makes it The Best in reach …

  • Mic Adam

    There are 2 comments I would like to voice:
    1. Out of the 105 million, how many are really active and contributing?
    2. Knowing internationally how things work, it is important to know how many twitter accounts there are in your region (eg belgium) – impossible to follow – you could be sending out message when no one is listening.

    Mic

  • http://twitter.com/SmurfGalak Shirley Thomas

    I think it's fine. All of us in the Twitter bubble take it for granted that other people know how Twitter works.. only to be blasted yet again by the 'I don't understand why people feel the need to broadcast what they eat for breakfast' comment.

    Everyday about 300,000 new users sign up on Twitter. This kind of article stands to survive multiple cycles of life yet.

  • http://twitter.com/manga0713 Cho eungjin

    so good point

  • mahnduck

    The title is weird. It should be “The 7 Things You know about Twitter”. Nothing is new to me. It is very general ideas for twitter users.

  • http://twitter.com/TryItToday Ashley Cross

    Check this out also! http://bit.ly/b2zg3k

  • http://www.videoexplainers.com/ Sales Letter Video

    There are far too many of them, far too often, and it’s unclear what you can do to get help. Many people start by asking their friends if they know what is going on, or what can be done.