How it all began...
Twitter hasn't been around very long. It started getting big in the year of 2008 when internet marketers and those working from home discovered its secret. At first, Twitter appeared to be a friend-tool in which people update their status to let others know what they are doing. Many people starting putting website and affiliate links in their status and now Twitter is used for 90% advertising. When internet users found this out, Twitter sky-rocketed! It's global traffic ranking using Alexa.com used to be around 10,000 near the end of 2007. Within four months it reached rank 1,000. From March to april 2009 it rose from 300 to around rank 40! Twitter just keeps becoming more and more popular. I doubt even Twitter saw this coming. Imagine taking your eyes off a website for a few months and seeing it increase traffic by 10,000%. This is how the management team at Twitter felt. There are now thousands of different site tools that use Twitter to expand themselves. Twitter is the future, Twitter is the new marketing home.
Does does it work?
The big question is: how does it work? When you login into your account on Twitter.com there is a text box on your homepage where you update your status and all of your followers will get the message. How is this useful? People that follow you are interested in your life or work. There are blog owners with follower lists of over 50,000. that means when they leave a message on Twitter, 50,000 people will read it. They are blatently using Twitter to get more readers, sales, etc. If someone wants to leave a specific person a message, they'll write "@twittername Hey look at this sick product www.productlink.com". It's really that simple. The Twitter website even has somewhat of a community to find people to start following. There is an updated list whenever you go back to related people that you're following or are following you. Twitter seems so simple yet there is so much we still don't know about it.
Who is using Twitter?
When Twitter started becoming big, mainly blog owners, webmasters and people wanting to promote their products used it. They would post many more than thirty times daily. Those people would go to their website or check out the product they're promoting. Now, everyone uses it...literally! I've seen famous athletes on there, music artists, and just everyday people like you and me. For example, I'll use Tony Hawk. His URL is http://twitter.com/tonyhawk. He's on TV everyday and all over the internet. He's even retired! His follower list exceeds 1 million. Yes, I said it. 1,000,000+ followers. And he's an ex-professional skateboarder. By just looking on his last posts he's promoting websites and products himself! I see his number one priority is about "http://www.tonyhawkfoundation.org/". About 33% of his status updates are about that specific website. He's also using Digg, cloaking URLs, etc. Tony Hawk is what I like to call a leader. People follow him. As you see he is only following about 100 people. Roughly, for every 10,000 people following him, he follows one of them. Let's look at another example, John Chow. Currently he has about 53,000 followers. He is a blogger. It looks like a pretty decent list. Over half of his updates are promoting his website or a partner site. Look how many people he's following. Roughly 50,000 people. I call him a dreamer. He follows thousands of people and hopes for them to follow him back. People who aren't well known do this. All they care about is advertising to tons of people. It isn't even targetted if you look closely. Half of his people don't even use Twitter anymore. There are golf lovers, UFC fans, etc. I'd say about 30% of his follower list are people actually interested in his work. The other 70% are following him because he simply followed them first. It's an act of curtousy. Everyone uses Twitter, it will continue to grow and grow.
How is Twitter Promoting Garbage Websites?
There are two main ways Twitter is promoting garbage websites. There are thousands of people using programs like TweetAdder.com to auto-follow thousands of people per day. Then those people follow the curtousy law to follow them back. Then there are the community websites like TweeterAdder.com which has over 150,000 members. These websites basicly consist of a single page where people just click follow hundreds of times and then they'll be on other users pages to follow. These sites cash in because people want advantages so they sign up as a premium user. A single day of being VIP costs a whopping $8.00, a single month is $100.00. These websites are adding thousands of untargetted followers to our list. It's dishonest. The followers probably have updates off because they only want people following them. They couldn't care less about what others thought. The only honest way to get targetted followers is to actually take time to go on blogs and other websites and looking at their content. Then follow them. Going down a list of random people and following 100 people within a minute won't get you anywhere! There are tons of people damaging Twitter.
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