You’ve started a blog but find it difficult to keep it updated with consistent, quality posts. Sometimes you will want to share just an idea or link with your community but posting one sentence or URL tends not to go down too well with your readers.
Media companies such as The New York Times and The Times Online are trying out Twitter as a way to send headlines and links to stories. African Social networking site, Muti, also publishes the latest submissions to a Twitter account enabling you to stay up to date via instant messaging. You’re also able to stay up to date with the live cricket scores via the CricTimes website’s Twitter account.
There is no right way to use Twitter but many bloggers have used Twitter for live blogging, personal updates, group chatting, event coordination or a combination of the above when compiling new blog posts with the help of their community.
Twitter As A Marketing Tool
So you’re able to follow friends and they are able to follow your micro-blogging activities on Twitter, great but what else can you do?
The latest addition to Twitter’s functionality is called track. Track allows you to track certain words from anyone who uses Twitter publicly. Want to know what people think about brand X or product Y? All you’ll need to do is send Twitter the message ‘track brand X’ and when anyone using Twitter mentions your brand X in their “tweets” you will immediately receive the message in your IM client.
This could be very useful when monitoring a new product that has just launched or very handy in Online Reputation Management for real-time responding and reacting to people using or abusing your brand.
Other Articles in the How To... Social Media Series :
- Part 1: Social Media - The down low
- Part 2: Social Networking - You can never have too many friends
- Part 3: Social Bookmarking and Aggregating - Avoiding overload
- Part 4: Content Sharing - So hot right now
- Part 5: Blogging - Starting a blog baby, starting a blog




