Thursday, January 08, 2009

Getting Fancy With Twitter

Today I discovered TweeteLater.com. It's a service that sits on top of Twitter and ads some nice feature. You can schedule posts (well, technically, "tweets") in the future, as well as auto follow people who follow you. It even allows you to send an automatic direct message to new followers.

These are neat features, but for most people, they probably aren't all that interesting. Twitter typically has a discussion / real time feel to it, why would you want to schedule posts in the future?

For me, on the other hand, I use Twitter as my "Corporate Blog" for my business. It allows me to publish news and tips like I would on a blog, but at 140 characters it's not nearly as much of a time commitment.

Using Twitter in this way also has a couple of added benefits. First, Twitter makes it easy to spread your update feed around using the industry standard RSS format. This means I can put company news on my website, Facebook and other pages with a minimum of fuss. Twitter also brings in the notion of subscriptions, allowing my company updates to be delivered to interested individuals, rather than just sitting on a web page somewhere.

For folks like me, TweetLater.com is powerful stuff. I can write a couple of blog posts and let them drip out over time.

I may use the auto follow functionality, as it's generally courteous to follow those who follow you. And finally, the auto Direct Message is actually my chance to send a sort of: "Hi, thanks for following me? Have an idea for software, we should talk!" message to everyone who follows me. It's yet another chance to pitch my business. I'm not sure how excited I am about this, but I'm considering it.

If you're like me, you've seen people use the above features - well, turns out there's nothing to it. Just a quick sign-up process and you're off and tweeting.

See you on Twitter as @i2x.

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