Five Reasons Twitter is an Essential Social Media Tool

1.) Twitter is about the conversation.

Sure, you can have conversation on blogs, on Facebook and on some other social media sites, but it’s a different kind of conversation with Twitter. The best way I can think to describe it is to give real world analogies. With blogs, you’re on stage speaking to a crowd. Sure, there’s Q&A via your comments, but you run the show. With Facebook, you have insight into each person via their profiles, but you’re mostly communicating one on one.

Twitter is sort of like a giant dinner party. There are tons of conversations going on and you can easily join one, or you can start a new one. If you start a new one, others can easily join in. You can even carry on multiple conversations at once. It’s total conversational freedom.

2.) You can use Twitter to promote your social bookmarking submissions.

Spend any amount of time on Twitter and you’ll see folks asking for help voting up a submission at Digg, Sphinn, StumbleUpon and a variety of other sites. With Twitter, you can get a feel for who uses which sites, you can keep tabs on who tends to respond when you ask for votes and you can pitch in to help other people’s submissions do better. Twitter can be a great way to promote your activity and accounts with social bookmarking sites.

3.) Twitter can boost your blog.

It’s a no brainer that you can send out a tweet with a link to your latest blog post. (In fact, many Twitter users now claim they rely more heavily on tweets than RSS feeds for finding good content.) Using Twitter to boost your blog doesn’t end there. Twitter is a great source of blog topics. You can pick up other posts and expand on them, get ideas from the conversations you’re having and discover new authors to add to your feed reader.

4.) Twitter is networking gold.

Listen to anyone talk about building links, launching a viral campaign or getting bloggers to cover your products and you’ll hear them mention the importance of relationships. PR firms are struggling to learn how to pitch people who aren’t trained journalists. The truth is, it’s quite simple. Respect them as a person and offer something of value. Make a connection. You don’t have to be their best friend, but you do need to make an effort to build a relationship.

Since most Twitter users share a combo of business and personal information, it can be a great way to learn a little something about your pitch target. Twitter has taught me who likes Trader Joe’s Black Licorice (Wendy Piersall), who goes nuts for Honey crisp Apples (Martin Bowling), who has dogs (David Wallace) and who spends two mornings a week working from Panera (oh, that’s me!.) Besides, if you find someone new you like, you can quickly look them on up Facebook or LinkedIn, add them to your network and learn even more about them.

5.) The Power of the Re-Tweet equals Viral Gold

It’s been said that blogs can take an idea and spread it from New York to Tokyo in minutes. If that’s true, then it’s also true Twitter can do it in seconds. It takes very little time to blog something. It takes less time to email something. It takes even less time to tweet it. Send something interesting out into Twitter and folks will pick it up and repost to their own list of followers in seconds. Suddenly your own network grows infinitely.

Time and time again, I’ve seen breaking news come across Twitter before I saw it anywhere else. I don’t have to check my feed reader, don’t have to wait for the news to break in on television, don’t even have to wait for a phone call. The second one person on Twitter hears the news, it spreads like wild fire.

In an Ideal World…

Now I wouldn’t really suggest someone rely ONLY on Twitter in terms of social media activities, but I do think there’s value in dedicating time to it. I have accounts on Facebook, Flickr and a wide range of social bookmarking sites, but Twitter is the only one of those services I use daily. In fact, Twitter is generally what prompts me to go and use the other ones. It’s sort of my central repository of social media activity.