“So tell me, what’s this Twitter thing all about?”

If I had a nickel for every time someone asked me this, I’d have $4.38.  Many people have different views on it.  I always hear people describe it as micro-blogging, or that it’s “kind of like an away message on AIM or like your status on Facebook.”

I think it is much more than this.  I always describe it as an open conversation about everything.  So much information flows through Twitter that it boggles my mind.  Of course whenever a new social network comes out, every tries to find ways to profit from it.  I’ve noticed, however, that few businesses have figured out how to leverage Twitter and join these conversation to connect to possible costumers.  Firstly, if you own a business and you don’t have a Twitter account for your business, you are CRAZY and simply don’t get it.  Secondly, those companies that have an account and simply follow as many people as possible in hopes that some return the follow are even worse!  If you are trying to sell something or promote something and you think that following 17,567 random Twitter users (I call this follow spamming) is going to help you, then you don’t get it either.  If you’re not genuine and you’re just looking to sell your products, promote your site, make money, etc. then you are not going to get close to the results you want.  Maybe 5 people of those 17,567 will really be interested in what you have to say.  You just wasted a whole lot of clicking for no results.  So how can you really make use of Twitter?

A lot of good companies out there that really understand Twitter have already built their brand and don’t need to do much more than be awesome to grab peoples attention.  But a lot of companies fail to really get peoples attention, or more importantly, fail to get the right peoples attention (potential customers, subscribers, viewers, etc.).  Maybe you’re just a little startup company, how do you get heard?  As I said in the beginning of this post, Twitter is an open CONVERSATION, so you need to join the conversation.  If you sell toilets, you better be using http://search.twitter.com and searching “toilet seats”, “toilets” and any other variation to find out what people are saying about them.  Why?  Because these are the people who might actually care what you have to say about toilets!  You need to engage in this conversation, @reply people, give advice, and be genuine!  Also using http://wefollow.com, which is a Twitter directory which groups people by their interests, to try and find people who are interested in your particular niche can help connect you to the write types of users.

Anyone who ends up following you in response to your help or comment is a much more valuable follower than one of the random people that might follow from follow spamming.  Engaging in conversation and being genuine will make people listen and respect what you have to say.  Use the many Twitter tools out there correctly and you will be able to connect with more valuable followers who will actually be interested in what you have to say.  Because let’s be serious, 99% of those random users who follow in response to follow spam won’t give a crap what you have to say, especially if you sell toilets (no pun intended).

I guess these big corporations just don’t get it.  Yahoo had something good going back in 2000, but now not so much.  Yahoo Buzz is essentially a Digg clone, but it lacks one essential thing.  Digg’s backbone is the community. They are constantly getting user input, and doing things to make the community aspect of the site better and better.  Yahoo unfortunately failed to realize this, which is why Yahoo Buzz is a huge failure.

This article with both Digg and Buzz buttons embedded shows it best.  The article about Windows XP’s support by Microsoft getting extended by 6 months was posted by tgdaily.com. The article had a total of 2040 diggs on Digg and 8 votes on Yahoo Buzz.  Not to mention if you look at the most dugg articles on Digg, they usually have thousands of diggs.  I’ve seen articles get in the tens of thousands of diggs.  Buzz’s top articles by vote at the time of writing included an article with 750 votes, and the next highest had 180.  It’s like comparing a PeeWee Football team to the Patriots.

Maybe next time Yahoo decides to leverage their large user base and copy another site to try to improve themselves, they should consider why exactly that other site is successful in the first place.