For the Tweet of it All

It’s not unlike me to be late to the party of social media. I didn’t join Friendster until September 2004, two years after it launched. I didn’t create a Myspace account until the fall of 2006, three years after it was founded. I finally fell in line (on account of peer pressure) and joined Facebook in July 2007, more than three years behind most people my age. And I resisted the Twitter craze until January 2012, when I finally created a handle, but waited to tweet for the first time nine months after that.

 

I can understand why I was so luddite-like with the first three platforms. In college, the only social media we had was AIM and the chat room on the university's intranet file-sharing site. So something like Friendster was a completely new concept to me. Then, I only saw the value of Myspace when everyone else in my kickball league was on it and convinced me of the benefits of joining (I'm fuzzy now on those benefits). And Facebook didn’t feel like a necessity until some of my closest friends refused to leave the platform for Myspace, and I somehow picked the "right" medium to drop and which to adopt.

But Twitter was something else entirely. Twitter was Facebook’s status update, but on steroids. Why would anyone want to post about every little thing that came to mind? Why was it necessary for Facebook and Twitter to exist?

This isn’t a story about my inadequate trend spotting. It’s about how colossally inadequate I was at predicting Twitter’s inevitable popularity and usefulness. To give you an idea of how late I was to this dinner party, in July 2011, the 200 millionth user created a Twitter account. I joined six months later, and tweeted after an additional nine.

Fun fact time. Did you know that Twitter was created as a sort of internal SMS service so that then-NYU undergrad Jack Dorsey and his group at then-podcasting company Odeo could communicate? (Not unlike the early beginnings of the Internet... sorry to blow your spot, Al Gore.) And that the medium really exploded when, over the course of the South by Southwest Interactive conference in March 2007, Twitter usage lept from 20,000 posts a day to 60,000 posts? Yes, in the course of a single weekend... at a single event. Conference goers found Twitter to be the perfect medium to keep in touch with one another. (It should be noted that Twitter would have been the perfect tool for Newsweek's Nick Douglas to make that announcement.) 

So it's pretty crazy to see the evolution from a simple medium utilized between office coworkers, to a method to touch base with fellow conference goers, to a tool that more than 500 million people use. (And to think I was still hesitant to drink the koolaide at 200 million.) Businesses have also caught on to Twitter's draw and is utilizing it for brand management. They've made it, well, their business to adopt Twitter as an alternative and effective marketing resource. Times are a changin' (sorry, Billy Joel) and people want their brands to speak to them personally. In recent history, savvy brands have taken advantage of historical moments (eg, the Superbowl, the Oscars, etc.) to post clever and timely tweets that, if they’re lucky, would draw an approving head nod or smirk out of the reader. And if they’re really lucky, they would land a new follower, if not for the love of the brand, for the respect of the tweet. 

So giant brands like Oreo have gotten into the Twitter game to connect even more closely to their fans/consumers/tweeps, but let's not leave out small businesses. If tweeting can work for the established brands, then why not for others? Here, Twitter reaches out to small businesses and in a creative display, works through the benefits of incorporating Twitter into their marketing game:

So where is Twitter going from here? Like any social medium, who knows for sure. (Great answer, I know.) Looking at the trends, I'd say businesses are going to become a heck of a lot more invested in the medium. With the ability to be "promoted", businesses are kinda all over Twitter. (I'm sure this is not new, but while watching SNL and simultaneously trying to think of witty things to tweet about, this is how my Twitter feed looked:

Miracle Whip, and earlier Diet Pepsi, dominated the top spot of my Twitter. I found it annoying... especially since I was trying to see 20 new tweets every couple minutes and Pepsi and Miracle Whip were taking up prime real estate.) So I think businesses are gonna get busy... actually, busier... with Twitter. However, I think the average user will probably continue to use Twitter to document his/her daily thinks... as insightful as most tweets tend to be.

Lastly, and only because I wish I had thought to do a retrospective of my life at the end of each year, here's a little something about the year in review, brought to you by our friends at Twitter: