Analysis: 7 Lessons Entrepreneurs Can Learn From Twitter's Success
 By any measure, the growth
and popularity of Twitter has been phenomenal. To say that Twitter has
hit mainstream isn't really the right metric to use. It's more powerful
to note that for a large group of Twitter enthusiasts, to spend even a
day without using it would be as bad (or perhaps even worse) than not
having email. It has become just that necessary. How did the site get
to this point? And what are the lessons that any entrepreneur might be
able to learn from how it got there? Here are a few thoughts on the
real secrets behind Twitter's success:
- Focus on real time.
For the socially connected online, there is little use for yet another
place to talk to your friends. If anything, we all have too many of
those to start with. But a site dedicated to RIGHT NOW stands out. It's
useful in a way that none of the other sites we use are.
- Skip the extra step.
Approving every friend request can be a lot of work - even if you're
not the most popular of people. It does make sense on most social
networks, but when it comes to posting updates on Twitter, if you do it
publicly, anyone can follow you without approval. The result is that
any user's audience on Twitter can grow exponentially without barriers.
- Force your customers to do less.
If you have ever heard the saying that "less is more" - Twitter is the
ultimate proof of that. The forced 140 character messages have made us
all refocus on brevity, and as a result of this volume decrease, those
of us that are constantly overcommunicated look to the site as the one
place where we can still feel that we are on top of the flood of
communication that rules our lives.
- Build enough evangelists to compensate when things go wrong. One
of the most well known facts about Twitter is that the service has been
notoriously unreliable and crashed frequently. Though it is much
improved from those days, the site still goes down or loses
functionality relatively regularly. Yet it has managed to build up
enough power users and evangelists, that people forgive their down
times and keep coming back.
- Integrate with the most popular competition.
The single most useful feature I personally uncovered from Twitter was
the ability to integrate it into my Facebook page so that may Twitter
updates also become my status on Facebook. This demonstrates a fact
that many entrepreneurs already know - by integrating with your
competition where your "customers" currently are, you make it easier
for them to migrate over to your site.
- Launch where your influencers are.
A big reason for the early success of Twitter was their launch at the
SXSW Interactive festival two years ago. It was a place where all the
influencers that matters for Twitter were already going to be and
putting the site in front of them there allowed them to become word of
mouth ambassadors for the site following the event.
- Offer a public ranking or authority. The
final element that has helped Twitter to succeed is that it has a built
in authority ranking with the number of followers you have. This is
located right beneath your username on the site and it's high
visibility means that it is easily the ultimate metric for anyone using
the site. And you can't help but want that number to go higher.
If you enjoyed this post, check out my other posts about microblogging and follow me on Twitter at @rohitbhargava.
Rohit Bhargava
This piece was originally published on Rohit's blog, Influential Marketing, and is posted on DMW with the author's permission. Rohit's bio can be viewed here.
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Comments
All valid, but overlooks a few important points...
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