Lessons to Learn from Twitter's Success

How can the immense success of Twitter help give some vision into ways you can improve your business? Here are some great points from Rohit Bhargava's Influential Marketing Blog

1. Focus on real time. For the socially connected online, there is little use for yet another place to talk to friends. If anything, we all have too many of those to start with. But a site dedicated to RIGHT NOW stands out. It's useful in a way that none of the other sites we use are.

2. Skip the extra step. Approving every friend request can be a lot of work - even if you're not the most popular of people. It does make sense on most social networks, but when it comes to posting updates on Twitter, if you do it publicly, anyone can follow you without approval. The result is that any user's audience on Twitter can grow exponentially without barriers.

3. Force your customers to do less. If you have ever heard the saying that "less is more" - Twitter is the ultimate proof of that. The forced 140 character messages have made us all refocus on brevity, and as a result of this volume decrease, those of us that are constantly overcommunicated look to the site as the one place where we can still feel that we are on top of the flood of communication that rules our lives.

4. Build enough evangelists to compensate when things go wrong. One of the most well known facts about Twitter is that the service was notoriously unreliable and crashed frequently. Though it is much improved from those days, the site still goes down or loses functionality relatively regularly. Yet it has managed to build up enough power users and evangelists, that people forgive their down times and keep coming back.

Labels: Social Media, Twitter