When I first started hearing that Twitter was planning to ask users to pay for their product I thought:  Dream on.  Nothing kills an online product like giving it away for free then requiring paid subscriptions.  It seems Twitter knows that too, as they claim they will continue to provide the basic Tweeting abilities we all love free.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone announced yesterday that they do plan to release Twitter business tools by the end of 2009, which they will charge for.  They do not plan to sell advertising but enhanced services like light analytics and enhanced methods for businesses to update clients.

When I work on SMO for our clients (and our own sites) I recommend and use Twitter more than any other social media as it fits with any business category: technology, music, retail, restaurants, etc.  Twitter can be used alone to notify followers of weekly specials, sales, performances, classes or how much you love that new movie you saw last night. It can also be used with blogs and other social media via RSS and widgets.  I like to call myself the Goddess of the Mash-up (has not caught on like I'd hoped it would???) but, really, I'm lucky to hold court to Twitter's mashability.

And, everyone is using it.

I grabbed this from Alexa today:

 

mmmhmmm...we'd all love to see that kind of traffic, eh? 

That's Twitter's daily users over the last 6 months.  Those of us Tweeters know that, once you create a Twitter account, you don't need to ever go back to twitter.com unless you want to edit the look of your profile; most of us Tweet from a third-party app or our cell phones.  Yet, that is the percent of total people on the Internet going to twitter.com.  By the time I finish writing this post statistics say Twitter will probably have 170,000 sites linking back to them and over 17 million users.

At last glance, Twitter was number 15 on Alexa's Top 100 Sites in the United States and ranked 37 globally.  Think about that for a minute...EVERY site on the Internet...

...why would anyone NOT ride that wave, especially when your sole purpose is to develop a larger web presence?

If you are not sold on social media's place in Internet marketing: Facebook is ranked 3rd in the U.S. and 4th globally, only to be preceded by Google and Yahoo!.

This is a rapidly changing Internet and I am having a great time following the progress!

You can check out Entertainment Engineering on Facebook and Twitter

Donna Winter

Donna is the Goddess of the Mash-up (AKA Project Development and Marketing Coordinator) for Totera Web Systems and assists Entertainment Engineering with social media marketing.  You're welcome to hang out with her on Facebook.