I was home for thanksgiving and got into a long discussion with parents about what exactly I do.  The SEO stuff actually made a bit more sense to them then the social media stuff.  My parents understood why it is important for companies to maintain an online presence but they really couldn’t understand the social media aspect of things, especially twitter.  My mom said twitter sounded like the biggest waste of time, this really got me thinking about twitter and why I think it is so valuable.  The next time someone asks you why they should join twitter (or tells you that twitter is a waste of time), send them a link to this post.

As you know I am quite an active twitter user and I use twitter to build relationships with people.  However, I think the value goes beyond the platform itself and extends to the actual users on the platform.  If twitter was just a collection of random people who only shared what the ate for breakfast then the value would be greatly diminished.  Have you every considered and thought about the people that are actually a part of twitter?  We’re talking about folks like the CMO and CEO of Best Buy, the Chief Editor at Business Week, the CEO of Zappos, Tim O’Reilly (from O’Reilly Media), Rick Sanchez from CNN, various politicians etc.  Some of the smartest and most creative people in the world are on twitter and YOU can talk to them.  Let’s say you wanted to send a message the CMO of Best Buy (like I did a few weeks ago), what would you do?  Go to the company site, try to find the contact information, send an email, and then wait for a response in a few weeks (if you even get one at all)?  What if you wanted customer service support from a company such as Comcast?

You can start a conversation with virtually anyone on twitter.  There is no other tool or platform out there that gives you the ability to connect with and interact with so many people, we’re talking about actual conversations here.  That to me is the true value of twitter.  The fact that I can send a message to a friend or the Chief Editor at Business Week is priceless, this is a new era of communication that people should really take advantage of.  If you are a marketing professional you can use twitter to search for jobs, if you are an author you can build up a reader base and connect with publishers/editors/distributors, if you are a retailer you can offer promotional items, if you are a fortune 100 company you can collect feedback from your users for product development; twitter is extremely versatile and multi-faceted.

Twitter is to communication and relationship building like Cable/DSL is to the internet.  Remember those 56k modems you used to have or that “turbo” button on your computer that was supposed to speed things up?

Is it time for a communication upgrade?

Thanks for reading