Tweet tweet...

Twitter has been heralded as one of the most widely used social media applications of our time. Created in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Noah Glass, it was adopted quickly and grew in popularity fast enough to rival Facebook. A free, elegant and well-designed interface that allows you to 'tweet' your mind at 140-characters a pop - what's not to like? Given that Twitter is so accessible, it seems almost every man and his dog has a Twitter account. I have a Twitter account - that I barely ever use - so it's no surprise that defining the purpose of Twitter is a bit of a challenge. Many people think that Twitter is filled with celebrities spurting pointless babble:

Or perhaps, shameless self-promotion: 

But Twitter has many purposeful uses too and some clever users have harnessed it to make significant changes to our world. It is one of the widest reaching, socially influential tools we have at hand after all:

According to a 2013 article written by Social Media researcher Jeff Bullas, Twitter has 218 million active users, monthly! And according to another 2013 article written by Irfan Ahmad there are 5700 tweets posted every second. And for every tweet posted the audience reach is x50 i.e. if 2000 people tweet about a television episode of say, Breaking Bad, a monstrous 10,000 people are reading those tweets. Seriously, check out these two links and infographics – it’s mind-boggling. I simply cannot comprehend how many people Twitter can reach!

But you may still be asking ‘what is the point of saying so little?’ and I'm sure there is some mystery in how an application that allows you to do so little can be so popular. In the video below, Creator Jack Dorsey explains how Twitter evolved from the SMS message service and how he believes the 140-character limit helps to keep tweets ‘in the moment’. So I suppose Twitter is about sharing what is happening to you (or for you) in the moment. The best example of this is probably The Blackberry Riots, where regular people used Twitter and smartphones to organise last minute riots across Britain in response to Government inaction. Or perhaps when typhoon Haiyan hit and Twitter helped spread the word faster than traditional news channels could cover it. 

What’s impressive about Twitter is it’s NOW, it’s CURRENT and it can be relevant. There are dozens of categories to follow, thousands of feeds to follow, millions of people to follow. And in turn millions can follow you. So Twitter is great for business, big and small. It’s a marketers dream if used correctly and it is free, free, free! So I guess the only question left is ‘why not?’

What do you think about Twitter? Do you use it? How do you use it? I love how every person uses Twitter differently and I’d like to hear about your experiences in the comments below.

Thanks for spending some quality time with me guys, see you next week!