Twitter - The next popular Social Media that’ll rock Sri Lanka

Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams, began as a research and development project inside San Francisco podcasting company Odeo in March 2006. Now it has more than 7 million users and growing rapidly.

Twitter described itself as “Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?”

Meantime, Twitter is described in Wikipedia as “Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.”

The short format of the tweet is a defining characteristic of the service, allowing informal collaboration and quick information sharing that provides relief from rising email and IM fatigue. Twittering is also a less gated method of communication: you can share information with people that you wouldn’t normally exchange email or IM messages with, opening up your circle of contacts to an ever-growing community of like-minded people.

But here’s the thing - you don’t have to listen to the incoming noise! You can ignore it if you choose to. Unlike email, Twitter is just ‘fly on the wall’ communication. On the other hand, if you have people following you, you hope they are listening so you can get your message across.

Every time you send out a tweet, all your followers will see it. Unlike blogs, Twitter is a real time broadcasting medium. You update, it is broadcast to your followers, and then it is largely forgotten (but not quite!)

The Benefits of Twitter

One of the main things that we’ve discovered about Twitter is that no two Twitter users are using it in the same way. Almost every Twitter user that we come across tells that they have a different objective when it comes to using it and are benefiting from it differently. But few common benefits were listed below:

• Interactive - The conversational format encourages participation. Twitter is great for collaborative projects. I’ve seen many tweets used for posting questions or taking informal polls.
• Social - Twitter gives followers and those being followed a chance to interact. Specially in business who you know is often as important as what you know. Twitter can help with that.
• Informal - Conversations on Twitter tend to be casual and intimate. People routinely tweet both about what they are having for breakfast and what project they are working on.
• Immediacy - Twitter’s real-time messaging means someone is almost always on Twitter, ready and willing to respond to any and all Tweets.

Twitter and Sri Lanka

Out of 7 million users in Twitter only handful of people are from Sri Lanka. They’re can be various reasons for this… but unawareness will be the #1. Also the biggest disadvantage may be the absence of mobile twitter post. But few non-IT companies were already stepping in to harness the power of twitter.

Countries like Sri Lanka with volatile and uncertain markets can directly get benefited by Twitter. Updated news are the driving force of this market.. But the broadcasting it is very expensive when it compared to other countries.., because of the less population and high inflation. The free tools like Twitter will add great value in broadcasting the latest message (for business it can be the marketing or promotional message) across, at least for the growing young and internet friendly generation.

Sri Lankans are very fond of Facebook. It’s very active and becoming a strong marketing tool as well. As per our studies; at least there is 2 -3% of the total population socializing in facebook. 90% of these are between the ages of 10 – 30. The some crowd will start checking out Twitter in the near future and will start blowing.