"Twitter is really the stupidest thing in the world," Chris Brogan, blogger and social media expert, said in his Blogging and Social Media panel at the O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishers conference in February. But he didn't mean it. At first blush, Twitter does seem like a dumb idea.
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It describes itself as "a service for friends, family, and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent messages. People write short updates, often called 'tweets,' of 140 characters or fewer. These messages are posted to your profile or your blog, sent to your followers, and are searchable on Twitter search." Your followers are the people who sign up to receive your tweets, and you are following anyone whose tweets you sign up to receive.
A February 2009 Compete.com study found that Twitter is the third largest social-networking site, after Facebook and MySpace. Many people and companies have ventured their ways on in the past year; it was ranked #22 in 2008. It has nearly six million users and 55 million monthly visits. Meanwhile, people are spending less time on MySpace and visiting it less often, as Twitter use surges. It's easy to imagine it climbing to #2 in 2010. A February Pew Internet & American Life study reported that 11% of online American adults use a service like Twitter, an increase of nearly 50% since May 2008. Anyone who's read their friends' mundane Facebook status updates may question the value of a social network devoted solely to status updates.
But Twitter has proven that status updates can go beyond writing about what you had for breakfast. Think of it as digital word of mouth. "I think of Twitter as the new phone," said Brogan. "I use it to talk to people and get business. I don't use it to talk about my cat." Yet in a February Abrams Research Social Media Survey of "over 200 social media leaders" from the U.S. and Canada," 40% of respondents chose Twitter as the #1 social media service for businesses, with LinkedIn at a distant second. One survey respondent described Twitter as "the quickest way I've seen to spread information virally to a wide scope of people attached in a lot of random ways," while another said it's the "best way to bridge the personal-professional gap. Once people care about YOU the person, they care about YOU the brand."
"I pay a lot of attention to what is going on in social media, since publishing as an industry will grow ever more reliant on the tools it develops," says Richard Nash, formerly of Soft Skull and Counterpoint. "And in order to understand, you must use." Here's how and why according to the pros, book publishers should be using Twitter now.
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