In January of this year, TechCrunch writer Eric Schonfeld reckoned twitter had 190 million users tweeting 65 million times a day. The question in my mind is why are all these people using twitter and how are they using it? Okay, that’s two questions. But I want to know and I think the best way to answer both questions is to study popular twitterers and see what they do.
Chris Brogan has 148,857, Joel Comm has 65,667 and Jim Turner has 41,181 followers, when I looked. With so many followers, they must be worth following. Right? Perhaps we can learn from them, and apply what we learn to get better results from our tweeting. Why are they on twitter? How do they use it and what tools do they recommend?
In my twitter presence, Chris Brogan talks about his strategy and the tools he uses. Chris uses twitter to promote, communicate, find new business, share, connect with people and find out what’s going on in his industry. He uses seesmic desktop and mobile to organise his tweets, socialToo to auto follow people, twitter search to find new business, listorous to find lists to join and oneforty for everything twitter. Chris has a strong brand so twitter is a good place to find new customers and twitter’s search tool is excellent.
Joel Comm is regarded as an expert. His book, twitter power, is now the top selling twitter book on amazon. Joel recommends using twitter to build your brand, connect with customers, search for evangelists or active twitterers in your niche, join discussions and start discussions too. For Joel twitter takes centre-stage in his social media and online marketing business. In his book, which is an excellent read (by the way), some of the tools he reviews are tweetlater(now socialOomph) for scheduling tweets, tweetpages for snazzy backgrounds, twitterfeed to connect with your blog and twellow to find people like you with similar interests.
Jim Turner is a successful copywriter and in his ebook, social networking, he writes about how he uses twitter to find new clients. He also uses twitter to expand his web of business resources and connections, meet new professionals, get answers to questions and get known as a copywriter in his niche. He uses twitter search to find followers, Mr Tweet(now being superceeded a new feature on twitter) to suggest people he should follow, the twitterberry for his blackberry and twittercounter to check how he is progressing in the twittersphere.
The fact is, people use twitter for different reasons and use different tools, but what we can clearly see from these popular twitterers are they all use it to find new business and connect with customers, colleagues and friends.
