Marketing Association of Pakistan

What is Twitter ?
Twitter is an online social network, launched in 2006 by Jack Dorsey. It lets its subscribers/users to send ad read text based posts up to 140 characters, known as tweets. It is also considered a micrblogging network. Since its launch, in a very short time, this service gained huge popularity with its user base surpassing over 300 million+ by 2011, generating about 300 million tweets and 1.6 billion search queries per day. Over time, features like picture attachment, URL shortening and tagging other users were introduced to make it more content rich and interactive.

Twitter was a game changer in social media, a new chapter, an innovation that would be termed as “SMS of the Internet”. Now people tweet about various stuff, from news to self-marketing and advertising. From giants like Apple, RIM to small startups like Greenfield Industries use twitter not only to announce new products and services, but to also interact with their current customers and future’s potential consumers. Most of these companies also provide technical and other support to the customers thru twitter.

Besides corporations, celebrities and politicians also got a tool to interact with their fans, share about their lives, and sometimes also make headlines. In 2010, Twitter announced plans to offer paid advertising for companies that would be able to purchase ”promoted tweets” to appear in selective search results on the Twitter website, similar to Google Adwords’ advertising model. As of April 2010, Twitter announced it had already signed up a number of companies wishing to advertise including Sony Pictures, Red Bull, Best Buy, and Starbucks. To continue their advertising campaign, Twitter announced on March 20th, 2012, that it would be bringing its promoted tweets to mobile devices. Twitter generated $139.5 million in advertising sales during 2011 and expects this number to grow 86.3% to $259.9 million in 2012.
Hence it is clear how big a change Twitter has bought to the social media. Besides all its roles talked above, recently twitter has been the reason for many revolutions, notably:
• US elections 2008
• Tunisian Revolution 2011
• Egyptian Revolution 2011
• Grant of Statehood to Palestine by UN 2011