Twitter, an awe-inspiring story for SMEs

Twitter is growing fast at over 1.123 million accounts per day, which amounts to more than 13 new accounts per second. So, as an SME if you think you have an exciting product or service for the common man, just embrace Twitter

Small and medium businesses (SMBs/SMEs) are no longer social media-averse. Given the current growth rate, SMEs cannot discard social sites, especially if they want their products to go global and reach millions of people in no time. Among all the social sites currently available on Earth, Twitter enjoys a special spot. One of the best means to promote businesses, Twitter can spread the popularity of a product or service to every nook and corner of the world. Twitter, ranked one of the ten most visited websites, is growing fast at over 1.123 million accounts per day, which amounts to more than 13 new accounts per second. So, as an SME if you think you have an exciting product or service for the common man, just embrace Twitter. Look at IBM. Thanks to Twitter, the IT major can predict wait times at airports by crowdsourcing information from tweets. It tweets for mentions of airports, then send an @reply to the tweeters and ask them to reply with wait times. Another interesting fact is that scientists can tell with great accuracy where you are from just by the words you use in your tweets.

Currently valued at $8 billion, Twitter’s evolution is just mindblowing that a startup or an SME can do well to emulate. Like every startup, Twitter – when started in 2006 by Jack Dorsey – was just an idea with only three people working on it. The origin of the company goes back to a ‘day-long brainstorming session’ conducted by board members of the podcasting company, Odeo. Dorsey introduced this idea while sitting in a park and used the first Twitter prototype as an internal service for Odeo staff. This social networking site’s popularity shot up with the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in 2007. Twitter usage increased from 20,000 tweets per day to 60,000 during the SXSW event and since then the company has not looked back. The number of tweets has ever been growing super fast. In 2008, there were only three million registered users and only 1.25 million tweets per day. Within the next one year, eight million users were registered with the site.

Source: CIOL Bureau