One of the first things you’ll hear from people is that “Twitter is not a broadcast medium.” It is, they’ll argue, a medium for two way communications. But let’s be realistic. Now that major celebrities and corporations are Tweeting, the service is featuring more one-way communications than ever before.
There’s no rule that says you have to follow everyone who follows you. Some do it because they think it looks like they’re interested in the law of reciprocity. But as the numbers of people following you go into the hundreds of thousands, it’s highly unlikely you’ll be personally communicating with everyone. So why fake it?
The larger your list of followers, the less likely personal communications remains the goal of your Twitter use
Once your list of followers becomes very large, the interpersonal aspects of Twitter start to lose appeal, and the marketing and broadcasting aspects of the new medium become more obvious. The potential for Twitter as a boon to marketing is not lost anyone who is trying to get the word out to the masses about a complimentary product or service.
Twitter is unique in that it limits messages to 140 characters, but since you can include a URL in your message, the limitation hardly matters. It’s a great way to point people to content or products on your website that might be of interest. In many ways, broadcasting to Twitter can replace many functions of email and email newsletters. Your followers are, in essence, a list of interested people who have “opted-in” to receive updates about you or your company.
Twitter can out-RSS RSS
Clearly there’s some overlap between this idea and what RSS if currently used for. But it’s not hard to imagine a world where Twitter is much more popular than RSS and people end up using Twitter in ways that RSS was originally intended for. As stated, a follower can get a list of interesting links from someone they’ve chosen to follow, but they can go one step further and actually respond to the link (assuming they’re being followed back). This provides instant feedback, and makes broadcasting through Twitter even more valuable than broadcasting your updates through RSS.
How many people in the real world interact with 300,000 people? Not many. But on Twitter, many accounts have reached these dizzying heights. Of course these accounts are maintained by people or organizations who generally have enormous “followings” offline.
Syndication is another no-brainer use of Twitter and many companies are already using the service in this manner. Again, Twitter is a one way communication tool when used in this way.
As Twitter continues to grow, more and more unintended uses for the service are bound to arise from the muck. With evolution, Twitter may even replace some of the current standards of online communication. Certainly using Twitter has a broadcast medium will be one of them.