Twitter is an incredibly powerful online news and social networking service. It’s in a unique league of it’s own due to several features that set it apart from other social networking platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and GooglePlus. Firstly, one of the main functions and uses of Twitter is as a news/events broadcasting channel. In many ways it’s more like a news ticker than a social networking platform (albeit a news ticker where you get to choose what news you want to hear about by choosing who you follow). In fact, it’s become a must-have resource for news networks and journalists who want to stay in the know about anything newsworthy in their areas. Journalists make up almost 25% of all verified Twitter accounts. Secondly, Twitter is all about short burst broadcasts. All posts consist of tiny bite sized messages, called Tweets, of 140 characters or less, or some combination of video/images and text. Users can broadcast and receive these messages via SMS, Mobile App, and the Twitter website interface.

Interaction with these posts can take the form of replies, likes, and retweets, with the latter being the ultimate sign of a successful tweet. For businesses and organizations, Twitter is used not only as a place to network and broadcast news, but also as a way to keep audiences updated about content published elsewhere. For example, some businesses primarily use Twitter as the “hey look” step in their content marketing plan, in which they simply Tweet every time they publish a new blog post on their website or a new video to their YouTube channel.

Bottom line: Twitter is a powerful, “short & sweet” social broadcasting platform that can play a very significant and positive role in any business’ online marketing strategy.