Social Networking Sites Twitter for Business Linda Mellon-Hogan July 13, 2009

Popular Social Networking Sites March 2009 US Market Share of Visits MySpace Facebook YouTube 8.84 Tagged 1.67 Twitter 0.66 Windows Live Home 0.56 Yahoo Profiles 0.50 Social Networking Sites & Applications for Business

Pros Ways to use Twitter  Breaking news at conference events  How people respond to products  Grasping a better sense of mind set of great influences  Keeping up company press releases  Use Twitter keyword feature in conjunction with an RSS feed re:product, person, enity  Sharing URL’s, maintain social ties The information Advisor, April 2008

Search on Twitter  Operators  Hash Tags #  #nationaleaguefootball  Minus Sign –  -greyhounds  Near:  Near:Philadelphia  Search Time Periods  Since: , until:

Cons  Tweets can a companies damage reputation  Employees can expose confidential information  Companies need to enforce social media policies  Twitter collects personally identifiable information and shares it with third parties and Advertisers can quote tweets in their ads  Who is using actually using Twitter  Top 10% of prolific Twitter users account for 90% of the tweets.  Different usage than other online social networks because the median number of liftetime tweets is one per user (Harvard Business.org)

Future of Twitter  Would you use Twitter for Business?

References  Barlas, D. (May 2009). Social networking sites and applications for business. Retrieved on July 24, 2009 from the Faulkner Information Services database  Heil, B. & Piskorski M.,(June 1,2009). New Twitter Research: men follow men and nobody tweets.  Twitter: fun and addictive, but is it a researchers’s tool?. Information Today, Inc. Vol 20, No. 4: April 2008