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With microblogging, you communicate with other users of the microblogging platform via very short messages using your computer or a mobile device. The people who receive your messages can be a select private group or public Internet users, depending on your needs and the purpose of the microblog. Microblog posts can contain text as well as video, audio, or pictures, and they can be submitted via email as well as the Web. The microblog content differs from a traditional blog in that of actual size and aggregate file size. Just like a regular blog, however, a microblog contain multimedia elements. Whereas blogs allow basically unlimited content, microblogs require you to be extremely succinct. The undisputed king of microblogging is Twitter. Twitter is the name most people use when referring to microblogging in general. That's not to say there there aren't other options, such as posting status updates on social networking sites like Facebook, but for pure microblogging, Twitter gets your name in front of the most people. Microblogging requires a different mindset from normal blogging – you must think in short bursts. It's a great way to share new products or events coming up. In addition to disseminating such information about your company, it's also a great communication tool for business partners or clients. Placing links to content on your web site or main blog is a good way to drive traffic to those properties from people already interested in your business. It can also be used as a source of content for updating your website. You may be thinking “Great! I can make lots of little blog posts. Big deal. Will it help my business?" Ask yourself this: would it be useful to your business to expose your products, services, or marketing message to hundreds or thousands of potential business sources? Most of you should be saying “Absolutely!" Some might argue that microblogging is of limited use to those selling products rather than services, but I disagree. One of the clients for whom I recently started managing a Twitter campaign is an online hardwood flooring dealer. Using automation, I set up a Twitter account for his company that constantly updates itself. I set the account up to display a combination of messages, some of which relate to specific products and some of which relate to general information about wood flooring. It took me a couple of hours to set everything up, using software that I will mention below, but after that the account has been on automatic pilot. The account how has a few dozen followers who are all somehow related to the wood flooring industry (generally people in a position to make flooring recommendations). This is a great start for the little amount of time I invested in the campaign. Now to keep his account growing, I will only need to spend a few minutes on it each week, adding some new followers and updating some of the content on which his posts are based. The key to the kind of Twitter automation discussed above is a tool called Tweet Later, which you can learn more about in the resource box for this article. If you are serious about using Twitter as a marketing tool, you owe it to yourself to check out Tweet Later. It automates three important parts of the Twitter process: making posts, following those who follow you, and sending direct messages to new followers. There is a free version with more limited functionality, but the full professional version offers a one week free trial with no credit card needed! Just visit http://www.trytweetlater.com. To learn more Twitter marketing strategies, visit http://twitterforbusiness.blogspot.com.
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