I thought so too but if you really use Twitter like you would using Facebook, you’ll never make the most out of Twitter’s potential.

What is Twitter?

Twitter is about updating what matters to you, what is interesting to you, and how these might be valuable to your followers once you update and share it with them. It’s all about providing value to your followers and in turn receiving them from people you choose to follow. It’s about 1 on 1 conversations with people, even with people you don’t even know, and being very personal about it.

Using Twitter for Search

Most often than not, I use Twitter’s search in substitution to Google to find out more information about things that I’m interested in, as the results you get from Twitter are real time voices of people. Take the Mumbai attacks incident for example, during the event, doing a search on Twitter will get you real time information about the incident, even right from the mouth of people who are at the place of incident, something that Google cannot provide in that sense.

Twitter for Marketeers

Twitter is also one of the most effective social network tools for marketeers to reach out to people who are interested about their products. Take Dell for example, who recently adopted Twitter for it’s marketing effort to spread the news about their latest promotion in real time and as a result earned $1million in revenue just by using Twitter itself. At last count Dell have 39,429 followers in their Twitter network. 39,429 people have followed Dell voluntarily to receive real time deals. Which means Dell can always reach out to 39,429 people in seconds whenever they want to spread the news about a deal.

Twitter for Bloggers

Twitter is great for content providers like bloggers for example. Everyone who blogs knows that it is very difficult to keep pumping out great content/post on their blogs for their community more than once a day, but by using Twitter, you can give out valuable information via short burst of tweets to your community who follows you on Twitter. Other than that, if you have a large community of followers, you can let them know via a tweet that you’ve updated your blog with a new post. When users find your post valuable and useful, they might tweet it to their network of followers and you will get increased traffic as a result.

Twitter Misuse

But hold your horses if you are thinking about using it purely as a marketing tool, and using it to solely to sell your product and not providing value or interacting with others. Because you’ll lose followers in the long run. Remember, Twitter is as much about giving as it is about taking.

Cost of Twitter

*Update
Twitter will remain free for use for everyone including individuals, celebrities and companies.

Here’s the latest post from Twitter’s blog regarding this.
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Twitter has been free just like Facebook or any other social networks. It is still free, but recently there has been talks about Twitter getting down to business, charging commercial users soon, but how they define “commercial users” is still not clear at this point.

To find out more about using Twitter, checkout this great slideshow “How Twitter Changed my Life” (top of page), by business and entrepreneurship student MinXuan Lee.

You can get more tips and tricks about using Twitter at Twitip, a very useful blog about Twitter by Darren Rowse, a very successful blogger who started Problogger.net and Digital Photography School.

*Follow us on Twitter if you will (@hex_sg or @benhomie, @greenlaundry), we’re using Twitter for leisure if you’re wondering.

Here’s a useful tip where most of us missed out, you can actually set your searching preference via this small link on the right of the search box:

Apart from many preferences you can set like language, explicit content filtering and number of results returned, the most useful one I would assume for most people is the “Open search results in a new browser window”.

Now you don’t have to use a keyboard key combination with the mouse to launch a new window from the search results. Small feature but extremely helpful.

I am guilty of spending too much time on designing and developing websites that I hardly spend much time on making them “search engine optimised”. Search engine is so powerful these days, people are reliant on it for almost all information they are trying to find. They don’t call anymore, they don’t ask, they search – and it is probably the fastest way into getting instant information.

Almost all of my websites are designed entirely in flash, they might be friendly to the eyes, but not exactly very friendly to search engines. This post a very serious problem especially when you’re relying on a website for your business. Clients wants sites to be in HTML and minimal flash so that it is searchable via search engines. Fair enough, moreover HTML can be deployed together with AJAX to minimise refreshes and put some life into the HTML pages by employing slight animation, but if you really love Flash like I do, you might want to SEO your full flash sites with – SWF Object

Benefits of SWF Object

1. It detects whether the flash player plugin is install on the user’s computer
2. If no flash player is detected, the same page that holds your full flash site will display alternative HTML content (note that the page will display “alternative content” and not bringing the user to an “alternative page”
3. The “alternative content” which you’ll design in the main page that holds your full flash site will also get picked up by the search engines making the page search engine friendly

5 Steps on using SWF Object (it’s easy)

1. Click here to go to SWF Object download page at Google Code
2. Download “SWF Object 2.0″ from the above mentioned site (SWF Object 2.0 is the latest available at the time of writing)
3. Copy “swfobject.js” from the folder you’ve downloaded (you need to unzip the folder from the zip file)
4. Paste “swfobject.js” into the same directory as your HTML page holding your full flash site
5. Go to the SWF Object HTML & Javascript generator page to generate a HTML page to embed your flash and include the most important “alternative content” (a.k.a. HTML content in case your audience don’t have flash player installed and at the same time making your site search engine friendly). The SWF Object HTML & Javascript generator page can also be downloaded as a HTML or Adobe AIR application via the same SWF Object download page at Google Code website.

And you’re done! I’ve made Hex search engine friendly by using SWF Object, see results! You can try it too and tell me if yours works.

*You might need to uninstall your flash player to test the alternative content without Flash Player Plugin, here’s where you can download the Flash Player Uninstaller. For more information and documentation of SWF Object, go to here.