Why Twitter is boss, and how you can use it.

Over the last 5 years Twitter has spread like a Charlie Sheen catch phrase. It's quoted in every news programme (sometimes as a legitimate source), every magazine and radio show. And it's easy to see why.

• There are 200,000,000 registered Twitter users.
• There are over 1,650 accounts created every second.

So, there's plenty of activity. The beauty of Twitter is that you largely follow people you don't know personally, because you like the things they say, unlike Facebook. On Facebook you're friends with people you know that largely post thrilling snippets of their daily food intake or their opinion on Big Brother.

As Twitter is solely status update style information, you can search these far easier, finding the correct info, faster, and people do as there are 1.6 billion searches every day.

It's a powerful tool for musicians too. The potential to reach a far greater audience than any other medium is being recognised by thousands of others did. For example, Hinterland's latest EP Envelope was available for free download. All you had to do was pay with a tweet. You went to their site, logged in to twitter, re-posted that offer and a download link was available. It does help that it was an awesome EP too, but what a great idea. Free publicity and the fans do the promotion themselves. Why aren't you doing that?

Twitter is not an island, you don't have to be twitter-literate (which is fairly easy) as the majority of traffic is from outside the service;

• As much as 75% of traffic comes from sources outside Twitter.

Having your twitter name on all your other channels can be really productive. Direct them straight to the sentance or two of information that their looking for, and they will be grateful.

So, do us all a favour and get involved. Yeah? Good.

Cheers,

Josh.

Follow Audio Works

Statistics courtesy of Michelle Carvill's awesome article.