Ideas & Opportunities

Twitter made significant news on April 17, 2009 when Oprah Winfrey made her first live update to its website on her highly popular TV show. The news came after Hollywood actor and Twitter fan Ashton Kutcher managed to beat the Twitter account of CNN Breaking News by a slim margin in its race to get a million followers. Welcome to the Twitter world!

Essentially, Twitter is an online tool for people to share 140-character updates or "tweets." It started out as a simple Web application during the infancy of Web 2.0, and now has over 15 million unique users in the U.S. alone. Based on information provided by Web information service provider Quantcast, a majority of Twitter users belong to the lucrative 18- to 34-year-old demographic.

After three years of operation, the website finally reached its tipping point and joined the ranks of Facebook and MySpace as a mainstream social networking service. In the local front, Twitter also expects significant growth in terms of number of users signing up for the service. It could possibly create a big following hand-in-hand with the Filipino's penchant for mobile services.

Says Miguel Paraz, one of the early adopters of the service: "Regarding the Pinoy's usage of Twitter, it's obviously still a toy right now. But its mobile nature gives it potential to grow because you can access it from relatively cheap phones, as opposed to other websites and even social networking services."

It is now viewed by many as an alternative source for real-time trends on a global scale. Indeed, Twitter has been known to break the latest news, both local and foreign, even before it hits mainstream media sites. Coupled with its universality, Twitter's simple and effective format makes for an agile communications platform that could give most information services a run for their money.

Some unconventional applications of the Twitter service are facilitation of community events among Twitter followers and running ad-hoc contests as well as transforming the Twitter account into a lightweight helpdesk system. A key objective here is to be able to take advantage of Twitter's key features, its real-time messages (should be concise), and its public. Of course, it is imperative that the user complies with the cardinal rule for small businesses on Twitter: Follow your users.

"Twitter can be another effective channel to complement your company's marketing efforts and build brand loyalty," says Joey Alarilla, multimedia head of local online gaming company Level Up! Games. This company is known to effectively use social media as a means to reach out to its predominantly online community. With its employees acting as brand ambassadors, it directly shares with its players information about its product and services.

Alarilla explains: "Twitter allows us to bring our message directly to our users and establish a one-to-one relationship with them. They are able to interact with us and give suggestions. That's the important thing to remember: Twitter is not a one-way street but an ongoing conversation with your users."

For Ramon Tayag, owner of graphic designed t-shirt retailer The Ink Squad, Twitter has also been a handy complement to his guerilla marketing strategies. It is proving to be an inexpensive way for him to directly promote the latest items in his inventory and to get instant feedback from his customers. "Twitter is a means to directly contact our users in a channel they are comfortable using," he says, adding that he also uses it for market research to find out what the users are interested in.

Clearly, Twitter provides entrepreneurs with another so-called disruptive advertising platform to promote various products and services. Disruptive advertising pertains to ideas that are daring and defy market and category rules.

At the local level, however, its usage is still far from mature. Local Twitter fanatic Jerome Gotangco says: "If you look at Twitter updates that mention Pinoy and Philippines, you can see users following and replying to brands they like. It's this level of intimacy and interactivity that holds promise for this microblogging medium," he says.