Launched in July 13, 2006, Twitter was born - a micro-blogging service where users send updates (tweets) to a network of associates (followers) from a variety of devices. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length. Each user has a Twitter page where all their updates are aggregated into a single list (hence the name micro-blogging). Tweets are not only displayed on a user’s profile page, but via instant messaging, email, or other social networking platforms, such as Twitterrific or Facebook. In addition, Twitter works with cell phones and other sms clients, making it an easy way for mobile users to stay in touch virtually anywhere at anytime.
Twitter is increasingly used by news organizations to receive updates during emergencies and natural disasters. A number of businesses and organizations arealso using Twitter or related micro-blogging services to spread information to its staff and stakeholders. Twitter’s growth rate is substantial, with several million users as of 2008. according to Bausch & McGiboney, (2008). Putting those numbers into perspective for normal people, as from August 2006 to August 2008, Twitter users created over 100,000 books’ worth of content at 140 characters at a time (Milstein et al., 2008), as the largest, most well-known, and most popular of the micro-blogging sites.
Twitter is a good example of Viral marketing, which can be thought of as a distribution of information about a product and its acceptance over the network. There is a long history of the research on the influence of social networks such as Twitter on innovations and product distribution. However, such studies have been typically limited to small networks in the past and typically a single product or service, said Brown and Reingen in early 1987. Viral marketing success comes from self-publishing Web content that people want to share. It’s not about gimmicks. It’s not about paying an agency to interrupt others. It’s about harnessing word-of-mouth, the most empowering form of marketing there is, and Twitter is a good means of communication to do so (Scott, 2007).
Comparable explanations were also made by DeBruyn and Lilien in (2004) in the perspective of electronic referrals or word of mouth. They establish that the characteristics of the public influenced by others’ comments (followers) had different effects at different levels of decision making for an issue. Factors such as strength of awareness, perceptual similarity, followers’ interest, and topic similarity had changed the way people looked at major issues and topics because of the way Twitter is able to give instant updates on issues, and subjects.
This image shows how people can be connected through twitters and followers.
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Reference
http://twitter.com/about#about
http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7027.pdf
http://ist.psu.edu/faculty_pages/jjansen/academic/jansen_twitter_electronic_word_of_mouth.pdf
Scott, D., M., “The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to use news releases, blogs, podcasts, viral marketing and online media to reach your buyers directly” (Wiley, 2007)
Milstein, S., Chowdhury, A., Hochmuth, G., Lorica, B., & Magoulas, R. (2008). Twitter and the micro-messaging revolution: Communication, connections, and immediacy—140 characters at a time. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media.
Bausch, S., &McGiboney, M. (2008). Nielsen online provides fastest growing social networks for September 2008. NewYork: Nielsen Company.
J. J. Brown and P. H. Reingen. “Social ties and word-of-mouth referral behaviour”. The Journal of Consumer Research, 14(3):350–362, 1987.
Arnaud DeBruyn and Gary Lilien. “A multi-stage model of word of mouth through electronic referrals.” 2004.
Accessed 15th June 2010 http://www-personal.umich.edu/~ladamic/papers/viral/viralTWeb.pdf
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