Twitter Uses

Gartner, Inc. an information technology research and advisory company researched Twitter uses. Garnter's research netted in finding four different ways companies are using Twitter. http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=920813. These four different ways are direct, indirect, internal, and signaling. Direct consist of companies using Twitter as a marketing or public relations channel, much like an extension to their corporate blogs. This method probably seems to be the easiest way to get started. Some within the Twitter community find this as self-serving, self-promotional tweets. Gartner also warns that responding to comments can be risky when going this route, but, while that's true to a point, when done right responding on Twitter can be of great benefit to the company. Indirect method use Twitter to let their employees tweet instead. As the employees use Twitter to enhance their own personal reputations, the company's reputation is also enhanced by proxy. This can go negatively or positively for the company. Another good reason for having employees tweet instead of the company itself is if the company wants to be seen as employing influential leaders. Internal use of Twitter can be used to share ideas or communicate about what projects they're working on. Lastly signaling represents companies as Twitter "listeners." Using search tools like search.twitter.com or desktop applications like TweetDeck are easy ways to keep track of what's being said about the company, its product names, or even the industry as a whole. Smart companies are tuning in to these micro-conversations to get early warnings of problems and to collect feedback on product issues or ideas.