Up until today I have been very skeptical of Twitter and it’s effectiveness in the social media realm. So why my change in opinion? Well, thanks to Firefox’s brilliant extensions I have found out why Twitter has become so popular..

Previously I did not see the point in visiting Twitter’s website to fill in 140 characters of your thoughts and then leave again.. What a waste of time! Just logging in every time was such an inconvenience for me.. Previously I was only twittering maybe every four weeks or so.. With this lack of enthusiasm obviously I was not going to benefit from these amount of posts..

Enter Firefox.. and their open source developers who continuously improve our internet experience. The guys from Infinimedia have developed TwitBin. TwitBin is an extension for Firefox so you can twitter within your browser in an unobtrusive way. It is a slide away sidebar which is constantly updating your profiles which you follow. You are able to set it to refresh every 3, 5, 10, 30 or 45 minutes. Now you can with one click of your mouse expose your thoughts to the rest of the world.

With daily twittering I am building up a nice group of followers who find my thoughts and opinions (usually search engine and internet marketing related) really interesting.

Firstly, if you don’t have firefox download it. Once you have downloaded and installed Firefox visit the Twitbin website and download their Firefox extension. Provided you have already signed up for Twitter you can sign in on their sidebar present in your web browser. Otherwise visit Twitter to create an account.

Once you are all set up and ready to go you begin the simple process of posting in Twitter. I recommend searching for leaders within your industry so you can see how they go about their twitters i.e. in my case I went straight to Matt Cutts of Google. It is very similar to a blog post but you only have 140 characters so you have to be resourceful and straight to the point. This is why it has become so popular, there is very little jabber and fluff in the posts. If there is then people will not follow your twitters.. It is that easy!

Tags: social media marketing, twitter

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 9th, 2008 at 8:33 pm and is filed under Social Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.