Twitter was launched in July of 2006 but exploded into the mainstream in March of 2007 at the SXSW music festival in Austin, Texas when Twitter showcased their company to music goers and showed them how they could Tweet to their friends about the great music they were hearing.
Twitter grew as a form of social media but many did not see the business potential in "a bunch of kids talking about what they were doing and what that girl was wearing.
" Perceptive marketers saw the potential.
What if you could find out what Tweeters were looking for, what they were telling their friends they liked, where they were going? You could create a promotion targeting those Tweeters.
Twitter, like the iPhone and iPad have benefited from the brains of their users as much or more than the brains of their employees.
Outside developers created applications (apps) that use the power of Twitter to do things the official developers had never thought about.
Some apps were meant for fun; silly little games that took you out of the stressful world surrounding the users.
Some apps were developed to harness and analyze Tweets and use that data to create promotions directed at the Twitter users.
Twitter is a powerful force in social media.
Twitter users are interconnected in a similar fashion to friends on Facebook.
Twitter users can "follow" other interesting users and in turn be "followed" themselves.
Twitter can be set to allow the users geolocation to be shown and this is a big breakthrough for business.
A business can now target users within a certain geographical radius that might become loyal customers.
Some applications allow the gathering of keywords.
A business owner might set the application to monitor keywords that are related to the business.
Say the business is a restaurant.
The restaurant owner could set the app to capture all tweets that include the words "hungry, starving, lunch, eat" or any other related words.
Now let's combine the geographical data and the keyword data.
This combination would allow the business owners to see which Twitter users within say 5 miles of the restaurant are Tweeting that they are hungry and looking for somewhere to eat lunch.
Twitter does not allow mass tweets to users that are not followers but the restauranteur could reply to the tweeters inviting them to come for lunch.
The restaurant owner could even offer a discount if the customer mentions they received the tweet.
So, you can see that there are applications that help local business owners grow their businesses by harnessing the power of Twitter.