I wasn’t even remotely interested in Twitter when it first arrived a mere five years ago. I was a student then and it was just another means for people to tell me what they were eating for lunch or what they thought of the family on Jeremy Kyle that morning. If you had SMS on your phone, could easily log into your Facebook page then Twitter seemed like it was simply another in a long chain of startups that people would be vaguely interested in for a while then forgotten.

I wasn’t the only one to dismiss it either, it was generally held to be symptom of how trivial life had become; updating the world on your existential angst in 140 characters or fewer. Even the inventor, Jack Dorsey thought it was inconsequential, its lack of substance even inspired the name, Dorsey says “We came across the word ‘twitter’, and it was just perfect. The definition was ‘a short burst of inconsequential information,’ and ‘chirps from birds’”

800px Jack Dorsey 200807231 300x201 Only Twits Like Me Ignore Twitter

Not So Inconsequential Now, Are You Jack Dorsey?

 

 

Along with Facebook Twitter was an important medium by which the Egyptian protesters could communicate with one another and the outside world, it was the power of social media which forced Mubarac’s government to completely pull the plug on internet services throughout Egypt for days at a time. These days important news stories are broken over Twitter, along with less important stories like royal weddings and what a celebrity was spotted having for lunch.

Part of our SEO strategy is to Tweet our blogs and articles, it’s a quick and easy and most importantly free means of propagating the things that we do, we hope that our blogs will be interesting enough to earn retweets until the word of mouth grows exponentially until the article has been read by everyone with a twitter account. We’ve yet to reach global saturation yet but it’s a goal.

If you’re in business it’s important to follow all of your business partners, those in allied industries and your competitors too. And you’ll be following people who inspire you of course, by following them they’re more inclined to follow you meaning that you can all share important information as it breaks. It might seem odd to follow your chief rivals but this is a social networking facility and events in the outside world can often have effects that are important to your entire industry, no matter how slog it out in the marketplace.

The amazing success of Twitter puts nay sayers and doom and gloom merchants like me on a back foot; if 140 characters at a time can have such a huge impact industrially journalistically and politically what will be next in the parade of world changing internet applications? Perhaps we should all start taking the inconsequential a little more seriously.