We talk a lot about niches here at Darby so Twitter is quite a blessing to us. We’re still in our infancy in exploring Twitter but I thought we’d share our thoughts and our use of it.
For a long time Twitter was unknown to many people and only existed to the few early adopters that had started using it. In the last two months, I’ve seen an explosion in the number of people who are either on Twitter or are asking, “what is Twitter?”
If you venture to the Twitter home page, you’ll see that they describe the service as a way to exchange short messages and answer the question, “what are you doing?“ However, this is misleading. I find that most people really don’t care what I’m doing and I, likewise, usually don’t care what other people are doing.
The power of Twitter is finding your niche.
Twitter seems vast with its millions of users and messages so it’s essential that we filter those users and message to our specific needs. Twitter has a feature available that is called a hashtag and it helps organize everything. Hashtags are essentially categories that are made on-the-fly. To create one, you simply type a hash mark, “#”, and then the name of your category inside your message.
For example, I live in Denver, I’m a vegan, I love hot sauce, I’m passionate about small business and I love to write software in a programming language called Flex. I can listen to conversations about all those subjects by entering their hashtags (#denver, #vegan, #hotsauce, #smallbiz, #flex) in my Twitter desktop program called Tweetie and I can now see people’s messages on those subjects.
One of the more active hashtag categories that I listen to on Twitter is #smallbiz. Small business owners from all over the world discuss how to grow their business and post great links to blog posts or other useful information. Interestingly, Darby Software is a small business that caters to other small businesses so this is a great place to allow us to connect with other entrepreneurs that help teach us to grow our business and it’s a place where we can help others grow their business.
Interesting Ben. I didn’t know you were a vegan. I definitely didn’t know you liked hot sauce (and you know I’m very willing to let you try some of my ’special’ ones
). I also had no idea about the hash search in twitter. I’ve had a twitter account for months and never got into it - I’ll take a look tonight and see if this can at least help it partially close the gap with Facebook…
Great info, Ben. And I do care what you are doing with your vegan hot sauce while living your life programming in Flex in Denver at all times. Ok, not really. I didn’t know about the hashtag smallbiz. Since I am a small business owner myself, I’m going to check it out on Twitter now. Thanks!