How tweet it is to be followed by you

By Emily on November 18th, 2009 in General Thoughts PR+New Media 2.0 PR+New Media News |

I spend more hours on the Internet than I do sleeping at night. Don’t judge me. You’re probably just as “logged on”. Typically, one window fills my screen with so many tabs open I only have a few letters on each to decipher which is what. The usuals include Gmail, Facebook, a few different news sites and Bloglovin’ (hi, my name is Emily and I’m a blogaholic). Oh, and I forgot one important tab—Twitter. For many people, Twitter follows them; to bed, on errands and even to work. And this isn’t a bad thing (besides the carpal tunnel). It’s actually the beauty of Twitter. There’s no stopping the Twitterazzi who, if you haven’t heard yet, now have access to a Twitter gadget—good for only that.

As a business tool, I think it’s unmatched in opportunity for creative dialogue with consumers. MGM Grand’s Tweet Your Sins campaign is everything you (or your business) should aim for—daily… scratch that, hourly engagement surrounding a creatively executed promotion. Winning sinners will get a free night at the hotel, where they’ll probably sin more and tweet less—after finding the bar and losing their phone.

You might as well jump on the bandwagon if you haven’t already because Twitter’s here to stay—sorry Miley. In fact, it’s grown 1,271 percent since October 2008 and is home to around 27 million tweets per day. But I’m understanding of those still standing in the shallow end (account active but no flow of content). 140 characters can be daunting for companies. But now is the time to dive in dear friends. Tools to help you tackle the social networking are popping up left and right. CoTweet has created a service to manage multiple Twitter accounts, track tweets, retweets, replies and direct messages. It even monitors keywords and trends. Voila, social media maven!

Eventually, it will feel good to have such possibility at your fingertips–literally. And, after all, people do “follow” the leaders.