Where is Twitter Used?

Twitter is a social media platform where users can post 140-character updates, known as tweets, to their followers. Tweets can include links to articles or videos and are searchable.

Structured topic modeling (STM), an innovative text-mining method, was employed to analyze interviewees’ tweets. The findings from this analysis supported what had been found during interviews.

Social media

Twitter is one of the world’s most beloved social networking platforms, boasting 500 million tweets daily. People use it to get news updates, follow celebrities and business leaders, stay in contact with friends, and keep in touch with others. Furthermore, it serves as an effective way of sharing links to articles or websites you find particularly intriguing.

Twitter offers brands an invaluable opportunity to engage in conversations with consumers and build brand communities. Indeed, 55% of consumers surveyed told us they want brands to help them connect with like-minded individuals and build communities they can feel a part of.

Twitter, established in 2006, provides users with a social media network to facilitate quick communication using short status updates of 140 characters or less called tweets that can be sent from either the Twitter website or through mobile phones. Other users, known as Tweeps, can read these tweets and retweet them to their followers.

Public relations

Twitter allows public relations teams to inform their audience of new promotions and events, communicate with customers directly, respond quickly to crises, and develop authentic, engaged relationships with their target audiences.

This study utilizes structured interviews and text-mining techniques to gain insight into how interviewees use Twitter to establish B2B relationships. The findings reveal how Twitter allows for customer and peer interactions that enable knowledge acquisition and innovation sourcing.

Topic modeling analysis indicates that tweets by SMEs that identify themselves as using Twitter for innovation and crowdsourcing at least once every month are more likely to touch upon IoT and big data topics than those from SMEs who do not identify themselves this way. This result confirms our expectations that firms that frequently seek innovation would post about such topics frequently on Twitter to increase followership for their products or services.

Marketing

Twitter can be a powerful marketing tool to help businesses build their brand, connect with customers and promote products and services. A thoughtful Twitter marketing plan will increase engagement while building loyal audiences to drive business growth.

Tweets consist of up to 280 characters and can link back to websites, blogs, or videos; include images, animated GIFs, or polls; interact with public posts by clicking either the heart-shaped “like” button or the one made up of interconnecting arrows going in circles to retweet them.

STM analysis confirmed interviewees’ answers that Twitter is used primarily for discussing innovation and crowdsourcing within their industry, with IoT and big data technologies being particularly prevalent topics of conversation. We anticipate SMEs will use Twitter to share innovation-related news and information.

Advertising

Twitter is a real-time communication tool that enables users to send 140-character updates, known as tweets, directly to their followers. Additionally, this service features the retweet (repost) function so people can retweet other tweets that express emotions, points of view, or interests. Tweets, by default, become public but may be set only visible to your followers if desired.

Twitter provides promoted tweets as another advertisement on the right sidebar or above your timeline. These ads target specific audiences for lead generation, brand recognition, or product promotion.

Twitter also provides other types of advertising, such as video and pre-roll ads, that are paid for on a cost-per-video-viewed (CPV) basis. In some instances, companies have suspended paid advertisements with Twitter but kept company accounts active so that customers could communicate directly with them and respond to trending topics and celebrity tweets; these company accounts have enabled companies to establish strong brand communities and develop loyal followership for themselves.