I’ve been asked these questions so many times since starting TwiTip that I thought I’d write a post answering it. I hope that it’s helpful for those of you just starting out with Twitter (or considering getting involved).

Twitter has changed the way that I use the web and connect with others online in many ways. Those of you who’ve traveled with me on my Twitter journey since the beginning know that I started out very skeptical of the medium.

It always seemed like a waste of time – however once I started using it I immediately began to see its potential and some tangible benefits to me. Let me try to break some of them down:

1. Research Tool

One of the things that I value very highly about Twitter is the way that it allows me to tap into an amazing community of people from around the world to find out what they are thinking, feeling and experiencing in different ways.

I’ve often said that Twitter makes me smarter because among those in my network are 18,000 people who collectively know and have experienced a lot of stuff.

I’ve always known that together a group is smarter and more powerful than any single member from within that group – but I’ve never really been able to tap into that power…. that was until I started using Twitter.

I use this every day as I write posts for my blogs (and ask readers for their ideas and experiences to help deepen what I write), as I tackle issues and problems that I face (there’s always someone ‘out there’ who has been through something similar and will quite often have a solution), as I face questions and as I develop my business.

Being able to tap into the Twitter community is incredibly illuminating. In fact these days Twitter is starting to replace Google for me. If I want to know something I’ll quite often ask my followers before I ask Google.

Also what I consider to be research is the ability for me to use a tool like TwitScoop at any point in time to see what is trending up in the Twitterverse at any point in time. In a sense Twitter becomes a news service with this and you’ll quickly find if there is a breaking story somewhere in the world by watching it.

2. Branding

I once wrote a post on ProBlogger about how a personal online brand is made up of the many ’strands’ of ‘presence’ that you have. You might have a blog or website – but when you’re also present on other social networking sites, forums, social messaging sites (etc) you reinforce that brand.

I’ve definitely found this to be true for Twitter.

Here are some of the comments that I’ve gotten from people in the past:

• ‘I used to read you at ProBlogger but had lost track until I found you on Twitter’
• ‘I subscribe to your RSS feed on the blog but seeing your posts on Twitter reminds me to read them more’
• ‘I was scanning through someone else’s Twitters yesterday and saw your face. I recognized it from your Facebook account so thought I’d check out you.’
• ‘I saw your name mentioned the other day on Scott Karp’s Twitter feed. I hadn’t seen your blog for a while and it reminded me to resubscribe.’

Twitter is a place that people are searching for connection and information. For me as a blogger who is interested in giving people information and drawing people together into community it is a logical place for me to be present because it reinforces my brand.
For me it’s like having a billboard on a busy virtual intersection.

3. Collaboration and Networking

I’ve lost count of the many opportunities that I’ve had to interact with amazingly talented, smart and insightful people on Twitter.

Some of these interactions have led to new ideas, others have led to temporary collaborations while still others have led to ongoing partnerships over time. The collaborations that have come out of Twitter for me have been both big and small – but collectively they’ve been incredibly significant.

In fact the opportunities have been almost overwhelming. There are days when I Tweet that I’m looking for someone to work with on an idea when the response is simply too much to handle.

Not only does Twitter open up new relationships – it’s a great place to cement and deepen existing ones. For example after a trip to Los Vegas for Blog World Expo earlier in the year I was amazed to find how many of those that I met were on Twitter when I returned home. In the months that have followed quite a few of those that I met in person at BWE have become regular Twitter buddies to this day.

4. It’s my Water Cooler

I’m a solo entrepreneur, working out of the front room in my house in suburban Melbourne Australia. Most of my contemporaries, readers and business partners live in other parts of the world (many in North America) – so at times it is easy to feel quite disconnected, isolated and even lonely.

Having previously worked in workplaces with teams of people – since starting to work from home I have always missed the banter, collaborative opportunities and companionship of having people around me.

Twitter in many ways has fulfilled some of these needs. There’s always someone around to bounce ideas around with, have a joke with or just to talk with about what you did over the weekend. While it doesn’t’ quite match up to real life workmates – it certainly has helped (and at times is even better….. because you can’t switch off work mates when you need to get work done!).

5. Direct Traffic

As a blogger I’m interested in building traffic to my web properties. Twitter has been an increasing source of this traffic over the past year or so. While it isn’t my primary reason for being on Twitter it certainly is nice to be able to post a link to a post that I’ve written or an online project that I’m launching and to see people coming directly from Twitter to that page.

What is even more special is seeing others promote my links on Twitter on my behalf either by ‘Retweeting’ my tweets with the links or simply by finding something I’ve written on their own and promoting it to their followers.

It is difficult to know exactly how much traffic Twitter has driven to my blogs (particularly difficult as so many people don’t actually follow Twitter on Twitter.com but use desktop clients that don’t come up with a referral metric) but as the picture to the right shows – last month Twitter.com alone directed over 8500 visitors to my blog at ProBlogger – I’d estimate at least that much again came from other Twitter clients.

What Would You Add?

The above 5 reasons that I use Twitter will not appeal to everyone. What I love about Twitter is that the more people I talk to the more creative and wonderful (and sometimes wacky) ways that I discover people are using the medium.

How does Twitter benefit you? I’d love to hear your own list of ways that you benefit from Twitter in comments below (or feel free to write a blog post about it and leave a link to it in comments below).

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



5 Ways I Benefit from Twitter

We have all been there. After I registered with Twitter in 2007, I sat down looking at the screen, didn’t know what to do next.

“What the heck am I going to do with 140 characters?”

I didn’t understand why people want to know when or why I just took a can of Coke. (After all, the question on the Twitter page is “What are you doing?”)

I still don’t claim to know everything about Twitter until today, even though I learn hard to understand it. Well, perhaps that is the awesomeness of Twitter. Right now, if you go to TechCrunch, starting from their home page and browsing through the archives, almost in every page you will see a mention of Twitter or one of the myriad number of Twitter-related services / tools.

It seems like every day there are new ways to use Twitter. Some of those tools stay, but a few of them are no longer with us.

There really is something in the 140 characters.

Out of those fun things to do with Twitter, one thing that I personally think most useful is using Twitter as a research tool.

Even if you just heard of Twitter right now, you can start using the data if you know where and how to get them.

This article is written to help. Because there are so many things you could do with Twitter, I will only give a few examples of using various tools for research, and leave the rest for you as an exercise of imagination.

Twitter for Historical Research?

With millions of Twitterers who mostly are making their tweets public, we are actually building a database of information. Remember that once tweet, those tweets will be archived, probably in multiple places. FriendFeed is an example that immediately comes to my mind.

That could only mean one thing. Twitterers are writing history in real time. As more data become available, and as more people tweet in the future, anyone will be able to fetch historical data from any point of time about any topic.

For instance, forever the 2008 US President election is going to be recorded in Twitter. In the future people would be able to dig into the Twitter accounts of both Barack Obama and John McCain to see the schedules, summaries, opinions, etc. about the campaigns and debates.

A big difference between Twitter and a personal diary is that people are able to interact or witness the interaction live or anytime in the future. Another great thing is, everyone is now able to participate as part of the history and be read by interested people.

If that doesn’t impress you a bit, I don’t know what will…

Know How to Use Twitter

Fortunately, using Twitter is just easy. There is not much convention to remember. Basically you can just type in and send, just like instant messaging or short message service.

The difference is, to get the most out of Twitter, you need to know the following syntax:

• @username – Reply. Tweets that start with an @ and then a username is a reply to that user. If you follow someone and want to reply to her, using reply is the way to go. Of course, this presumes that you don’t mind the message is available publicly.
• #tag – Hashtag. Hash that is immediately followed by a tag (hashtag) in Twitter is a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. The contexts could be events, disasters, memes, or others.

As more Twitterers use the right syntax, they will add to the repository of data, which in turn return more useful results for future searchers. Right now, a lot of people forget to use hashtags for a particular event, and that increases the likelihood that their tweets will not be seen by others — or various Twitter tools that use hashtags.

Two Main Ways to Perform Research with Twitter

Twitterrers with a lot of followers certainly have an edge here. It happens everywhere. If you have a group of people who are willing to hear what you have to say, or if you have friends who you can call anytime, you can just do that and ask them for opinions or anything.

This leads us to the first way to perform research with Twitter, which is to…

1. Ask. If you follow Darren, you will occasionally find him asking questions. Not only does that encourage participation from his followers, but he also gets the information he needs to write the next blog post, or just as an insight to understand his audience better. What you could ask the followers is limited only by your imagination. Questions that can be answered quickly are winners. With the right engagement, results will pour in soon after you tweet. Directing the followers to a series of questions, such as a survey, on the Web may work but I haven’t tested this yet. To get more responses from your questions, you might be interested to learn how to ask effective questions on Twitter.
2. Search. By using publicly accessible data, you can also learn a lot. For instance, if I search for tweets from Darren and his followers, I’d be able to find out answers from his questions and use those for writing ideas or for other things.

With so many useful Twitter tools, searching is more complex than you might imagine. Using Twitter Search is useful to find event-related tweets, but if you want to get information about the trends, #hashtags is more useful though.

Knowing what is possible and which tools to use at the right time are two critical keys to save time and retrieve wanted results.

Essential Twitter Tools You Should Know About

This list is by no means complete. As of this writing, there are hundreds of Twitter tools out there but here are a few of them that I frequent. With these tools under your belt, you should be able to get started in using Twitter’s data effectively and expand your toolbox as you see fit.

• Twitter client. Your mileage may vary but I find it easier to use Twitter client such as Twhirl to post updates. Not only that but you will be able to perform search inside Twhirl because of its integration with Twitter Search and TweetScan.
• General search. Both Twitter Search and TweetScan provide reliable search for Twitter’s data, but the former allows you to drill down your search queries using the Advanced search feature.
• Tag search. Twitter Search is also able to search for tags, but #hashtags returns a graphical representation of the trend for a specific tag. The downside is currently #hashtags is a bit slow and incomplete.
• Conversation search. If you want to search for previous conversations, again Twitter Search is able to provide you with the information. If there is a conversation related to a tweet, you will see a link to Show Conversation.
• Location search. TwitterLocal is a useful tool if you want to perform a search for tweets within or around a specific geographical area.
• Keyword search. Monitter lets you monitor 3 keywords live at the same time with the ability to nail down geographic area. Use this to get a hint about current trends (how popular one keyword is).
• Topical research. If you know someone who is an established expert in an industry or niche, use TweetStats to see which keywords he uses most often. TweetStats represents the data in TweetCloud, which is much like tag cloud but for Twitter.
• Popular URL search. Twitt(url)y sorts URLs by how frequently they were mentioned in tweets. Think of a mention as a vote in Digg. The more people talk about a URL, the higher the rankings in Twitt(url)y will be. This tool is useful if you want to spot popular topics using aggregated Twitter’s data.
• Data aggregation. This is not specific to Twitter, but a lot of people syndicate their Twitter feeds to FriendFeed. With it, feeds from Twitter and other social media sites are aggregated in one central location for followers to consume. FriendFeed also has powerful filtering and search feature.
• Search result monitoring. Again, this is not directly related to Twitter, but often times conversations shift back and forth between blogs and Twitters. If you monitor the the Web and news, using Google Alerts or the blogosphere with Technorati, among others, you would be able to track the whole conversations.

Many of the tools above also publish feed related to the search queries. The only effective way to keep up with all of them, in my opinion, is through an RSS reader. While you can still receive Google Alerts via email, I find it more convenient to use an RSS reader because of the amount of information I track on a daily basis.

Use whichever you like most because there is no right or wrong way to do this.

Successful Twitter Stories

Of course, the following stories or case studies are related to using Twitter for research, basically anything from getting information to understanding a bit better about your target market.

1. @bbgeeks builds 500+ loyal followers in 8 months (as of this writing there are 1,114 followers). Those followers are people who are interested in Blackberry. Not only they able to get free brand exposure and traffic, but also tons of content ideas and direct feedback from informal polls. How do you like your audience to tell you what to write instead of you struggling to come up with ideas to write next? Click here to read more about bbkgeeks case study.
2. Just last week, offended moms took revenge over Motrin ads through Twitter by uniting and voicing their displeasure with the ad. The key is in the term “uniting” which in Twittersphere (Twitosphere?) can be as simple as using a uniform hashtag (#motrinmoms). Motrin’s web site was crashed by the rush of traffic. People were using Twitter Search to monitor conversations in real-time. Miss the entire story? The same tool tool also allows you keep up with the conversations. To be fair, after J&J apologized, Twitterers also twittered about it.
3. David Murray (@DaveMurr) reached out to his followers and publicly announced that he was looking for work. He did a research in Twitter Search and keep track of conversations with RSS feed. He landed a job that had not even been posted. (Read full story.)
4. If there is one company that aggressively — in a good way — uses Twitter, it is Zappos.com. Zappos jumped on the Twitter bandwagon early to engage with their prospects and customers. They currently have more than 20,000 followers. Zappos encourage their followers to participate by holding a contest, in which they asked their followers to help them rewrite confirmation email. CEO Tony believes connecting more deeply with customers is important, although Twitter takes up a lot of his time.
5. Businesses of different sizes are using Twitter for different purposes. Tapping into the minds of their customers through Twitter is a great way to research the market. But, what if you are a solopreneur who works from home? How could you use Twitter for research, with no followers? Just use those various tools mentioned above such as Twitter Search to find out what people are talking about in your niche. If you are a blogger, you could use it to get constant flow of ideas for blog posts or your next product.

I think you now agree Twitter is a powerful business tool that changes how people reach and respond to the market. Best of all is how average people are able to use the publicly available tweets to better understand their target audience.

If you have used Twitter in one way or another for research, or if you have thought about how it should be used, please share with us here!

Hendry Lee helps bloggers overcome strategic and technological challenges in starting and growing their blogs. He also writes about social media on his blog Blog Tips for a Better Blog – Blog Building University. While you are there, download your free eBook and subscribe to the blogging e-course!

Follow Hendry on Twitter (@hendrylee).

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



Twitter for Research: Why and How to Do It, Including Case Studies