1. Influence: The more useful and relevant information you post on Twitter the more followers you will gather and larger will be your circle of influence.

2. Instant Exposure: There is no tool more powerful than Twitter for this purpose.Used in the right way, this is one of its biggest benefits- The right way being: don’t say anything you don’t want to say, consider your audience and always think twice about what you communicate.

3. Building contacts and influence: If you are tweeting right, you will allow access to billions of people as twitter has mass appeal. Yet you have to target the correct audience to derive instant results.

4. Build up a Buzz: If your company is a part of an event, conducting a conference, annual general meeting, launching a product or making an announcement; twitter is the right place to create a buzz and a sense of anticipation and excitement for your audience if it really matters to them. But keep in mind that this is done within your deadlines. If you makes promises and do not deliver on twitter, most likely you will instantly lose followers.

5. Live Tweets: Just like any commentary to a match, twitter can be used during live events to create an additional buzz around that event. Tweet what is happening, talk about the speakers, rate them, exchange thoughts and comments with people in the same room, and publish live feeds and links.

6. Excellent Brand Builder: If you want to know whether your company is being spoken about or not Tweekdeck is one such application where you, your customers and employees can use buzzwords and search any word is being spoken about you. This strengthens the importance of transparency and immediacy.

7. Substitute for coffee machine/ water cooler: This is an excellent place where employess can stay in touch about the happenings in the office thereby substituting the coffee machines and water coolers which used to be a commonplace for discussions.

8. Brevity: With the current 6 second attention span of modern online browsers, twitter is an excellent platform to send out a clear message within 140 characters. Twitter does not believe in writing a lot much to the advantage to our browsers. Sending short quick messages is the main essence of twitter.

9. Follow Competitiors or Sales Leads: Great way to keep in touch with what your rivals are upto. But again don put up false identities be honest to who you represent.

10. Crisis Communications: Twitter helps companies mitigate the effects of a crisis or even reduce the damage if your followers are well targeted.

11. Customer Service: Comcast had brilliantly used twitter to its favour by completely turning around its bad image by active twittering to all its customers. Just ensure that while answering customer queries the right thought leader is answering them.

12. Thought Leadership: If there is someone in your company who is an expert in their area of work, empower them to tweet. Let them represent your company.

13. Corporate communication: Very short company announcements can be easily tweeted, but again double check what you want to tweet that can engage your community of followers.

Stay Tuned and watch out for the next wisdom series as I will discuss the Do’s and Donts of Twitter.

Follow us on @iridiuminter or my personal twitter @sbharatam

What is Twitter?

Twitter is essentially one very large continuous conversation being had by millions of people as we speak. In the last year itself, the usage has risen by 93%. This microblog is designed in such a way that the conversation is narrowed into two principal groups, the followers and the followed. You, as a user, have a choice who to follow and who follows you. It is advisable to have a high ratio of followers v/s followed , say 1:10 ratio is excellent to get your voice echoed beyond your immediate network.

This then narrows down to third and final basic stage with the type of conversations you have and with whom you’re having it with. It’s completely open to however you want to use this new toy. If you want to keep your feed as broad as possible, then you have that choice, but if you want to narrow it down to your specialism, your interest or hobby or corporate sphere then you can do that too. It is, like any social networking site, it’s for you to tame it the way you want.

Why should I sign up for Twitter?

Many communication experts and Marketers  have been asking me why they should sign-up? “What’s the point?” In many cases it’s a valid point. A recent survey reveals that over 60% of online users who sign up, leave Twitter in a month. This may be due to their short attention spans or the inability to comprehend what it can do. One of my colleague at iridium Interactive was sharing that its not different to the SMS that we send and thinking in 140. But, take a deeper dive and you might just find a layer or two of digital pie that suits your corporate palette and the benefits are vast and untapped. So, take the jump and take-off your social media.

You might find this short video helpful with due credits to Common Craft.

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Follow us on @iridiuminter or my personal twitter account @sbharatam