Micro-Blogging - Huh?

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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.

Micro-blogging is the solution as it is a form of blogging that allows a user to publish short text updates, usually limited to 200 characters that can be viewed by anyone or restricted to a specified community as specified by the micro-blogger. This can be accomplished using various communication tools such as Instant Messaging (IM), via the web, text messaging on your mobile phone, and even a Facebook application. The most popular micro-blogging service is called Twitter, which was launched in July 2006. The main competitor to Twitter is Jaiku.

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.

From here you will be able to see the information the particular user has made available about themselves via their public Twitter profile. You will be able to immediately engage with this user and communicate via their preferred communication platform.

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.

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