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The IT Report
To Twitter or not to Twitter
Thursday, 15 July 2010
By David Burns
We all know about Facebook, which has emerged as the major global player in (mainly) social communication networks using IT. While Facebooks’ success has come at the expense of its key competitor MySpace, it has existed virtually hand-in-hand with Twitter and almost certainly you have heard the word used at some point in the past year or so.
Twitter was invented during a business brain-storming session at a podcasting company in the US called Odeo, during the mid-2000s. Jack Dorsey introduced an idea of an individual using an SMS (text message) to communicate an idea to a small group. The word ‘twitter’ struck pretty quickly in the office.
A prototype was used as an internal service within the company, and the first ever Twitter message was posted by Dorsey at 9.50pm, March 21, 2006. The first public, full version was introduced in July that same year. By April 2007 Twitter had morphed into its own company.
It is remarkably simple and is premised on the basis of the ‘tweeter’ having ‘followers’. The tweeter can post a short message (initially limited to 140 characters) which will appear for all that follow it.
Twitter revolves around the principle of followers. When you choose to follow another Twitter user, that user's tweets appear in reverse chronological order on your main Twitter page.
A key milestone for the company was during a music festival SXSW where Twitter had a mini explosion with user numbers leaping from 20,000 to 60,000. It provided a phenomenal means for attendees to communicate quickly and constantly amongst themselves and became the talk of the festival. Bloggers referred to it as ‘owning the festival’.
Things blew out of control after this - 500,000 ‘tweets’ per quarter in 2007. This escalated up to 100 million per quarter by the following year. At the end of last year this figure had mutated to 2 billion tweets per quarter.
In the first quarter of 2010 there have been 4 billion tweets posted. What has been interesting is the spike in usage relating to specific events. For example the 2010 FIFA World Cup saw marked increases in use at crucial times during matches. On 17 June 2010 a record 3.085 per tweets per second were posted during the NBA basketball finals.
While it is ranked as one of the most visited sites worldwide – daily usage estimations vary due to Twitter’s active accounts numbers not being released.
Twitter itself has projected that by the end of 2013 revenue will be $1.54 billion with 1 billion users. While Twitter has been used for a variety of purposes since its inception, at Origin we are most interested in its use as a business marketing tool. It has certainly worked for Dell computers who have reported that USD$9 million in sales came directly through Twitter and Facebook.
It isn’t just for enterprise companies either. Twitter lets small businesses to compete with the big boys and a UK survey showed that 17% of SMBs were using Twitter to attract new business.
• David Burns is BDM for Origin IT | davidb@originit.co.nz |
www.originit.co.nz
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