Twitter - what is the point?

[anonymous-user]

[redacted]

[daveco]

Everyone likes to feel important and cared about; it's a simple, base need to feel what you do and what you are, matter.

[escargot]

Lots of good points on this thread: http://www.pistonheads.co.uk/xforums/topic.asp?h=0...

Particularly Ted's.

[10JH]

It won't do a lot for SEO, the links are no-follow. It could be used for driving traffic though.

I can see the point in it for business, but not really for personal use. I reckon it's best used for marketing, seeing what customers think and keeping updated on your industry.

[escargot]

anonymous said:

[redacted]

I'm in recruitment and use Twitter to advertise jobs to candidates who follow us - it's just another communication medium.

[PetrolTed]

There's a lot of noise on there because people use it for all sorts of things.

Bear in mind that it's just a transport mechanism, the content is varied. It is no longer simple a list of 'status updates' for celebrities.

I've been having some fun with it by pasting geolocated tweets onto a map. Whilst a lot of it is just social chat, you can see the emergence of some interesting uses for geolocated tweets including travel news, jobs, adverts, crime reports, live reports from fires, incidents etc. These tweets are street level. In future news will be tagged to locations, not just regions.

Twitter will be the medium by which lots of info like this is broadcast in a format that can be read by all websites. You'll find sites listening to Twitter for these updates - you may not even realise that's where the info comes from in future.

[rolex]

The perfect transport for disinformation, a modern day "chinese whispers"

[softtop]

I was in a 'media' type seminar the other week and the speaker suggested that the 'tweeters' should keep the noise down while tweeting. If the people who read it were so interested then get off your fat arses and attend the meeting. Why the need to let people know what is being said insted of actually concentrating on the event is beyond me.

[Fittster]

What's the point of posting on PH?

[Rude-boy]

Fittster said:

What's the point of posting on PH?

Don't know.

Just off to drop the kids off at the pool. Will update later.

[Mark-C]

Fittster said:

What's the point of posting on PH?

I find it an excellent way of getting inaccuracies in my grammar highlighted.

[peterbredde]

This question keeps being raised in our marketing meetings in work. No matter how it's explained to me, I keep reaching the same conclusion - it's pants.

[AcidReflux]

Glad I'm not the only one bewildered by Twitter.

[sadako]

Twitter is just a mailing list for text messages. I much prefer it over facebook which seems to consist of friends sending me application requests that want to take my contacts, download all the islamic fundamentalist zombie goat bukkake off my hard drive and make a backup copy of my brain for marketing purposes in order to display a spinning gif and tell me to forward it to my friends.

[PetrolTed]

For businesses it's like offering customers the chance to subscribe to a newsletter, but in a more terse and lighter weight format.

[escargot]

AcidReflux said:

Glad I'm not the only one bewildered by Twitter.

Yes, I know what you mean, it's almost as complicated to grasp as making toast.

[toxgobbler]

Makes it easier to stalk people...

[Glassman]

Don't even start on hashtags and trending topics.

[parakitaMol.]

peterbredde said:

This question keeps being raised in our marketing meetings in work. No matter how it's explained to me, I keep reaching the same conclusion - it's pants.

Marketing is only communication

Twitter is only a communication medium

Good marketing is about communicating with people using the language and channels that they prefer.

If your customers (or wider networks) use Twitter why would you not want to communicate with them using something that they are currently engaging with?.

Seems very obvious.

What I don't understand is why people jump on the bandwagon, mistakenly thinking they 'must' have it, (because everyone else does), yet their customer base or wider stakeholders don't.