Twitter is an excellent way for companies to maximize their personal contact with customers and promote products and services to early adopters and trendy users. It can also function as an effective customer service tool and is a way to monitor complaints and concerns that are being aired on the internet by especially vocal customers.

A company can open a twitter account under their name and use it to promote products and services. By sharing links and information with followers, twitter is a means for making customers (especially devoted ones) aware of new promotions. Offering samples, coupons, and links to new products and services is a great way to attract attention to them and to reward loyal customers. Two companies who do an excellent job of this are Forever 21 and Starbucks. Take some time to look at their technique.

One of the keys to using your company’s twitter page as a promotional tool is to be careful to balance types of tweets–sending out too many in promotion of a product will irritate followers and cause them to unsubscribe. A good way to combat this is to limit the number of tweets per day and to balance tweets with coupons and other perks with ones that are strictly advertising or promotional.

Monitoring complaints and customer issues on twitter is a great way to resolve problems and build customer rapport. By regularly utilizing the search tool on twitter and entering your company name, you can find out if a disgruntled customer has taken to the internet to air their complaints. Direct-messaging the customer and offering a solution, refund, apology, or other rectification for a poorly managed service or customer issue can be a great way to generate positive PR for your company. Users who bother to complain on the internet will also be likely to publically praise your generous handling of their problem and all of their followers will then be aware that your company is paying attention to its customers’ needs.

Lastly, twitter can add a humanizing touch to your corporate image. By replying to users comments about your services and having conversational exchanges with customers using twitter, you improve your image by attaching an interested internet presence to a real person. This is something even a very well-designed website can never accomplish and is an important function of twitter that many companies ignore. Because twitter is a shorthand (140 characters) form of communication, it requires very little time to send the occassional reply but the impact in terms of positive customer relations and loyalty can be markedly more valuable than the small amount of time it took. One company who succeeds remarkably well with this human touch is Bonobos, a pants company based in Manhattan.

I first heard about Twitter over two years ago, when I was perusing fitness blogs. Some of the fitness bloggers had taken to using Twitter in order to track their daily food intake, meal-by-meal. Although this was before Twitter had applications that allowed for better smartphone functionality, such as TwitterBerry and TweetDeck, which would have allowed them to tweet what they were eating immediately after a meal, it still seemed like a convenient tool. I gave it a shot, but never really got into it then. My Twitter quickly stagnated, and I never would have guessed that a little less than two years later, Twitter would become a pop culture sensation.

I can’t remember exactly how Twitter started becoming so popular. Something about Ashton Kutcher and Shaquille O’Neal having a Twitter, so I decided to sign back up. As soon as I signed in, I saw that I could follow so many more celebrities than just them, although the list only extended from “celebrities I kind of like” to “celebrities I don’t really even know.”

I followed, and then quickly unfollowed, Stephen Fry. As lovable as the man is, he Twitters too damn much. Twitter has been a bastion of (mostly useless) information as well. I learned from Cesar Milan (the Dog Whisperer) that dogs sweat through the pads of their feet, and I was one of the first to know that Gavin Newsom would be running for governor of California, as his very first announcement was through his own Twitter. I know when a Twittering baseball player feels like he has tendinitis, and when he feels like it’s just shoulder soreness, and I now know that the writers of the Office act a great deal like the fictional writers of 30 Rock.

I stopped Twittering about a month after I joined, because I realized that, even though I think it’s hilarious, no one really cares that my dog almost burst through the sliding glass door in her (successful) attempt to eat a fly. However Twitter is definitely still a feature in my daily “rotation” of the ten or so sites that I visit multiple times on a daily basis. However, I’m a fickle follower, and I find myself deleting 3-4 more Twitters from my follow list per week. And as tech savvy as I am, I still don’t quite get the re-tweet thing. What, @ replies weren’t good enough?

One lesser-known feature, in terms of how to use it, is the trending hash #. Used for games, protests, and just plain silly Internet themes, the trending hash is placed in front of a word or phrase to make it stand out when talking among people. That way, when searching trends, the hash mark makes a common phrase for a game stand out among ways it may be used in other tweets.

One popular Trend is called #blamedrewscancer. Twitter users #blamedrewscancer for things that go poorly, and BlameDrewsCancer,com records it, hoping for a company to sponsor each blame towards a cancer foundation.

Twitter is something that is here to stay. People devoted to other Social Networking sites will eventually come around and see that Twitter is a fantastic communication too. It’s ease of use, unique features and variety of people is a testament to it’s lasting power.

You can follow anyone, from ZombieCptPicard to MSNBC. GossipGirl updates you on that guilty pleasure show you watch, and your best friend complains about the homework they forgot until last minute.

In the age of communication, I highly recommend everyone starts Tweeting. Otherwise, you’re just out of the loop.

What I want to talk about here is some advanced ” Twitter Fu” – Techniques for “power users” ( I hate that term), and people who are ready to start taking advantage of some of the really remarkable things you can accomplish with it. This isn’t comprehensive, of course, but i do speak from experience.

What i’m going to write about comes from my daily use and experience with Twitter.

I want to show some ways you can use Twitter to accomplish something REALLY remarkable – Connect up to people in a community (or build a new community) with strong ties.

A way to use Twitter:

1. Tell people what’s blooming in you Garden

2. Give a little Grandmotherly Love

3. Use twitter feed to feed you blog to twitter

4. Help spread the word about keeping cool dogs out of hot cars

5. Announce your artwork “Pick of the Week” on Zazzle

6. Let people know the 411 on ebay

7. Give 10Bright Ideas to Make your home energy efficient

8. Use Squid easting

9. Show people The Funniest Squidoo Lensmasters.

10. Ask who would win in a fight? Kool-Aid Man or Hawaiian Punch’s Punchy?

A Personal Experience using Twitter Perhaps you are interested in becomming a mystery shopper also known as a secret shopper but weren’t sure what the job entails, if there are any mystery shopper jobs in your area and whether or not it is even a legitimate opportunity.

The good news is that mystery shopper jobs are real and you can actually get paid to shop though it is important to associate yourself with a reputable company, one with national coverage that has a proven track record of getting good secret shopper jobs with known businesses.

Twitter used to have the air of a geek service but that was before Oprah. Now, however, if you want people to recognize your true geekdom, you have to exercise a little more creativity. In that fix myself, I thought, “What’s the geekiest way to tweet?” The answer came to me immediately — do it from the Linux command line.

The Simple Way

The Twitter API is pretty simple, so you don’t really need to have any specialized client if all you want to do is submit your tweets. If you have curl installed, you have all you need; if you don’t, from Debian or Ubuntu you can just do apt-get install curl as root from the command line. Once you have curl, you can submit a tweet really easily. Just do curl -u “user:pw” -d “status=Your tweet here” http://www.twitter.com/statuses/update.xml replacing “user:pw” with your username and password and “Your tweet here” with your tweet. You’ll get a bunch of messy output, which, once you know you’ve got it working, you can route away by ending the command with: > /dev/null

Still too much typing?
Put it in a shell script. For example: #!/bin/bash curl -u “user:pw” -d “status=$1″ http://www.twitter.com/statuses/update.xml >/dev/null (again replacing “user:pw” with your username and password). Save the script as, for example, /usr/bin/tweet, make it executable by chmod 755 tweet and then all you need to do to send your tweet is: tweet “Your tweet here” That’s the simple way. However, if you need to access the fancier features of Twitter — and you probably will — you will either have to go to the web interface and give up your geek status, or resort to the fancy way.

The Fancy Way

If all of this looks too much like coding to you, there is already at least one good command-line Twitter client. It’s called twyt, and was written by Andrew Price. It’s much more full-featured than the example above; in addition to posting tweets, it will let you follow the public timelines, your friends’ tweets, direct messages and @tweets. You’ll have to have the Python programming language installed — most Linux distros already do — and you must install python-simplejson. When that’s done, you’ll be able to issue simple commands like: twyt tweet “Your tweet here” twyt friendstl That’s probably all you’ll need to get started; the manual included with twyt will explain more. Happy tweeting from the command line!

Freelance Writer

Twitter can be a great resource for writers. As a freelance writer, I’ve used Twitter to find and contact sources that I would otherwise not have known about. I received an opportunity to write an article about an NBA basketball player, who had recently died.

Along with my other research, I used Twitter’s search function, available at search.twitter.com, to find people who had been taking about his death. I used additional terms, like “knew him, “friend,” and “met” to find the people who would be most useful for my article.

In addition, you can use Twitter’s search functionality to narrow your results in a variety of ways. One of my favorites is the “near:” function. If my publication were based in Kentucky, for example, I could use the following search to find sources for an article about gardening in the region:

“near:Kentucky planted garden -RT@”

This would help me find people who recently talked about planting a garden in or around Kentucky. “-RT@” helps me filter out some people who are just repeating others’ messages–this lets me get to the source of the best content.

Once I’ve found somebody whom I think might be a good contact, I click on his or her tweet to be taken to the user’s page. This shows me where they’re from, what other things they’ve been writing about, and how they describe themselves. From this information, I should be able to make an informed judgment call about whether or not it’s worth my time to try to contact them.

After I’ve decided that a person is worth investigating as a source, I send them a message using Twitter’s “@reply” feature. Make sure that you click the reply icon on the tweet that you want to respond to. This keeps the tweets linked together, making it easier for the user to see what you were responding to. It also keeps your message from appearing on the homepage of each of your followers–which can be useful if you’re sending very many interview requests.

I think it makes sense to follow anyone that you request an interview from. This allows them to DM (direct message) you with contact information that they might not like to send out over the public timeline. You can always unfollow them after your deadline has passed.

One word of warning: some users go on Twitter more frequently than others. It makes sense to make several more requests than the number of sources that you actually need. This way, if some take a long time to respond (or don’t respond at all), you’ll still be able to finish your story.

I always jump on the social networking bandwagon. I have a MySpace that I don’t use, a LinkedIn that I don’t understand and a FaceBook that I’m addicted to.

So when I heard about Twitter, I thought it was dumb (to put it mildly.) To be fair, as a general rule, anything that is promoted by news stations before the general public knows about it, I believe is trash.

Three months ago however, one of my many employers sent out a mass email telling us to follow them on Twitter. I am a full-time college student who does marketing jobs on the weekends; passing out flyers, signing people up for credit cards, doing food samples at Walmart/Sams Clubs and going to concerts and giving out free stuff.

The email stated that extra job openings will be tweeted 3 times a day. Usually these marketing gigs go by quick because they pay well and the work is not too difficult. So, I swallowed my pride and joined the twitter world.

After browsing, I realized that a majority of my marketing employers used Twitter to post new job openings that they don’t send through mass emails. I started to follow all my employers, potential employers, family and friends too.

I linked my cell phone to Twitter and I receive on average 100 text messages a day from potential employers. I was getting sick of it and about to quit until something great happened.

Last month, I received a Tweet on my cell phone while eating dinner. My boyfriend rolled his eyes because he is sick of hearing “Almost Easy” every hour when my cell phone “Tweets” goes off. The tweet said “Cartoon Network Event in WPB, FL need staff immediately.”

I called my staffing coordinator and she hired me that second. I worked that entire week and got my biggest paycheck ever. $1,000 for roughly 30 hours of work, that’s a lot for a college student (Although it’s gone now, due to wonderful bills.)

So, I have resumed being in love with Twitter. I use it primarily for work (I have FaceBook for friends/family) and I get so many extra jobs from it.

I know that Twitter can revolutionize the job hunting process for many unemployed people. I read an article claiming that Twitter has helped many people find jobs.

Employers like Palm Beach Post and ATT post jobs on Twitter and it can be great to be able to get job postings to your cell phone so you don’t have to sit by the computer all the time.

I wonder if Craigslist has a Twitter?

You always hear people talking about social networking sites like MySpace, Friendster and Facebook. Forget about those sites and check out Twitter! Everyone is all hot and bothered by the new internet craze called Twitter. It is on the lips of every CNN news anchor, Conan O’Brien talks about it on the Tonight Show on NBC, and even recently my own mother has started twittering.

Twitter is a great way to keep in touch with friends, family, co-workers and other people you who want to know what’s going on in your life when you want them to. You can send out tweets through your phone or computer and people can follow you through their phone or computer.

More than just a large way to “text the world” Twitter has become a way to reach a large amount of people in a very short span of time with a very short number of characters. It’s great for on the go and when there’s too much people to stay in touch with you can just twitter to let them know what’s been going on with you.

You can also send a twitpic, which lets you share pictures with your followers. For example, when you are on vacation, take a picture with your camera phone and upload it straight to twitpic from your phone to let your followers see what you’re doing at that very moment.

Try using the search engine and find your family and friends who may be on twitter. You might want to follow people as well and get their updates. You can reply directly to your friends twitter updates and they can do the same. You don’t have to worry about privacy because you can make your page private and only let your friends view your updates or you can make it public for everyone to view.

You can control who follows you also by accepting or denying peoples requests. If you don’t know anyone on twitter there is a “Suggested Users” page where you can find interesting people to follow.
A lot of celebrities are on twitter too. Try doing a name search to find your favorite celebrity and follow them to get their updates. You’ll find everyone and anyone on twitter.

Also try following your favorite television show or your favorite store you love to shop at. It’s a great way to find out when the store is having a sale or other great deals. I used the “invite by email” page on twitter and got all my family and friends to sign up and follow me and I’m following them too.

I know in my experience I have used Twitter in more than just a causal way. I have found that Twitter can be a useful funnel of people into your own blog or actual money making website.

The thing is that you have to have a good hook. You have to have a gimmick that no one else uses. For me, I have used a “joke a day” idea to keep people interested in my website. The jokes pertain to the topic of my website and I include a link to my website in each Twitter post.

This idea can be adapted in a number of ways for your website or business. If you have a humorous business you can go the “joke a day” route. Serious business men might not want their business promoted by whatever lame quips you have hired the temp to come up with.

You can also try a “fact of the day” but make sure to make it interesting and make sure it relates to the type of business you are trying to promote using Twitter. Once people are hooked on your “whatever it is of the day” then you can watch the ad dollars start rolling in.

It doesn’t take much time to set up a Twitter account or to come up with a bunch of jokes, or ideas, or facts of the day. All you need is 20 minutes on Google and you are all hooked up.
Who knows, once this Twitter craze dies down, your company might still be known as that one place where they give out the interesting facts, or silly puns.

I would image that once you have hooked your new clients in with Twitter, your fabulous customer service and dedication to a quality product will take over.

No matter what age you are, twitter is great, fun and easy to use.

Twitter is a preview of the third generation of the web, where we are communicating in real-time. The first generation of the Web was rather static. It was mostly about companies displaying their products and services on web pages. Individuals started creating personal websites, but they too were static. The Web was used for publishing and a lot of screen scraping was done to cut and paste from other websites so you could fill your own.

The second generation of the Web, the so-called ‘Web 2.0’ was already more interactive. With the advent of Web services, the web became a more connected place. Companies now had to show much more interaction with their customers and started using the social networking media like MySpace and Facebook, to set up a dialogue with their customers. Individuals were using these social networking media to connect with their friends and to keep them posted on what they were doing. Everywhere you could see ‘wikis’ being set up and individuals started blogging about a wide range of subjects. This created a web where you could follow what was going on in a certain niche and take part in the discussion.

The third generation of the Web is about to break loose. Here we take one step further than interactive, we go real-time. Here the Web is just there… connecting everything and every body. We will see real-time interactions between devices and people are juicing a gigantic stream of data that everybody can jump into. Surely people will still be concerned about what happened in the past, but this generation of the web is about what’s happening now.

Twitter gives us a glimpse of what this the third generation of the Web could be like. It lets us communicate in near real-time, but it resembles a stream of information we can dip into.

Many things that happen in the world are reported on Twitter first. When that plane landed in the Hudson River early 2009 a guy called Janis Krums was on the ferry picking up the first survivors. He took a picture of the plane and tweeted this to the world. When the elections in Iran in June 2009 were over, the world learned from the many tweets from Iran that there were violent protests against the election results. When the protests started, the regular news media like CNN did not pick this up for hours. This in itself caused a big discussion on Twitter (#cnnfail) about the role that the regular news media should be playing, where what is happening on Twitter is taken into account. The issue here is: can what is tweeted be trusted by the news media or is further investigation required. The answer is a difficult one, but one thing is clear “ the truth is more seen than read”, so anything that is documented on video or photos, can be trusted more than what is just written.

As a user on Twitter there are a lot of features you might not be wholly familiar with. The following are Twitter features you will come across, if you follow a lot of different users. You might not completely understand these techniques when other people use them until you try using them yourself when you tweet! You can visit these links I’ve compiled that highlight these common Twitter methods that can make your tweeting experience much more rewarding.

URL Shorteners

Sometimes you want to tweet about a website or URL of an article you’ve just read and want to recommend to your Twitter community. However, hyperlinks are often longer than the 140 character limit imposed on your tweets. The solution is to use a tool called ‘URL-Shortener’. You can go to a number of sites that will shorten a URL for you, such as TinyURL , tr.im, p.ze and others to receive an abbreviated version of your URL that still brings you to the same website. Use the tinier version in your tweet without it using up all your 140 characters!! It also makes your tweet easier to read. More and more of these ‘URL Shorteners’ or ‘URL Cloakers’ are springing up. bit.ly is a very popular one. This shortens your URL automatically if you enable that, but more importantly it shows you how many times your short URL was clicked on.

Re-Tweet

In Twitter you will often see people use the term “RT” in their tweets. RT stands for ‘Re-Tweet’ meaning you have tweeted what somebody else already tweeted. Basically “retweet” just means quoting what someone else has already posted on twitter. Users often also ask you to retweet (RT) things in their own tweets if they want to spread the word about something very important to them. Read more about retweeting at http://wiki.answers.com

Hashtags

Another common phenomenon that you will encounter on Twitter, is the use of the “hashtag” or #. This little symbol allows the user to tag keywords within their tweet. Follow the user’s hashtags along with real time results for keywords that other Twitter users are tagging. You can read more about the use of hashtags here: Hashtags.org.
StockTwits is an excellent application based on Twitter for real-time updates on stock trading. Whatthetrend.com allows the users to see what is most popular on the twitter and why it is popular. It is a wiki so that anybody can add the information. Twitter-Atlas- allows users to view tweets on a world map. Twittelicious- Combines twitter and delicious.com. Twitpic- A way to share pictures on Twitter Twitterfeed- Offers to tweet the last posts published in a blog via the RSS feed.

Advanced usage

Twitter can be used in many ways. For example Twitter can be used as a marketing tool. You can find and add people within a geographic area or people interested in particular things using the search feature provided by Twitter. In that way you can track potential customers and market your product to the right people. In another way Twitter can be used as a real-time news agent. You can see what is hot in the world from the trending topics section at the twitter page. Many people now use automated tweeting softwares to update tweets. For example developers can create tweeting application from a blog posting automatically as it is created.

It is surprising that Twitter itself does not offer a way of controlling and measuring which keywords are being used in real time since they do mark trends of the most tweeted about terms. This might change on Twitter’s part in the future. These are just a small example of the type of methods you will see people using on Twitter that can make your own Twitter usere experience more fun.

Go out explore and find more useful techniques and enjoy your tweeting adventures!

by Jane Craford

“I survived the Twitpocalypse!” blasts the graphic on the organic cotton T-shirt available from cafepress.com.  What’s the Twitpocalypse and why should I care?  Tweets are being sent to Twitter at the current rate of 202 tweets per second.  Each tweet has a unique identifying positive number.  When the torrent of tweets exceeded the number 2,147,483,647, some third-party Twitter applications were not designed to handle this condition and would crash when their application would suddenly turn the number into a negative sequence. Thus, the verities of computer science seeped into the consciousness of everyday Twitter users.

Tweople of all types start paying attention to the tweets in the substantial Tweet Stream.  The Italian Futurist artist, F. T. Marinetti, would probably delight in the blend of popular and high culture that mixes in a Twitter stream.  Marinetti would probably recognize his ideas, handed down to us in his Variety Theater Manifesto, living in the Twitterverse.  The absurd juxtapositions, the random surprises, the illogical interruptions, when popular and elite, high and low culture are syncretized in the Twitter stream echo what Marinetti saw as the ‘great Futurist hilarity that should make the world’s face young again.’

The new meaning or unexpected perspective that is sparked by the collisions from the juxtapositions of contrasting types of information is one of the addictive pleasures of Twitter.  A mind dulled by the tedium of a boring job can be revived quickly by as little as a half hour of exposure to the effervescent Twitter stream.  At the rate of 202 tweets per second, that calculates to 363,600 tweets in 30 minutes.  The number of tweets flowing in one Twitterer’s stream, however, represents the tweet activity of only the set of people that Twitterer is following, rather than the sum of all people logged into Twitter at that moment in time.  The hilarity of random surprises would be minimized or maximized, depending on the characteristics of the Twitterer’s group being followed.  If you follow only elite, high culture-type Twitterers your Twitter stream may be less effervescent than it would if you also were following pop culture Twitterers whose tweets when juxtaposed with the high culture Twitterers could add some gas to your Twitter stream.

Twitter can be a refreshing flow of tweets that make your ‘face young again.’  At the same time, it can be a lifeline for an endangered person or community desperately seeking connection to a rescuing world. On the same weekend that the Twitpocalypse occurred, the Twitter stream was carrying immediate reportage of the election in Iran.  Twitter’s highly evolved search function sprung into action as news about the Iran election was sought, causing a proliferation of Twitter search tags (hashtags), such as  #IranElection, #tehran, #CNN, etc. that could be clicked on within a tweet to enable rapid response to the breaking news event.

Two billion, one hundred ninety-two million, ninety-two thousand and counting unique tweets have been sent since Twitters inception in March 2006.  This instantaneous global communication (for those who have access to at least a texting cell phone), like a swiftly flowing river, is cutting new shorelines and reshaping the geography of our minds at the rate of 202 tweets per second.  If F. T. Marinetti were alive, I’m sure he would be twittering and I’m sure his face would be young again.