Why use Twitter?

I recently bumped into this question for possibly the 10th time in a pretty short time. When the question is posed by an every day person, just like me, you could actually answer the question with "why not?". Because if you already use other social networking tools such as Facebook or you already have a blog and on top of that already read and contribute to various online forums then what is the point? The honest answer is that there really is none. You usually create a Twitter account for the same reason that you create a Facebook account, start a blog, read rss feeds from sites that have things you're interested in, etc. Of course this only applies if you don't run a business, if you're a celebrity or for some other reason make your livelihood of the content you produce online, among other things.

That's just the simple answer though. There are of course 101 other reasons for a normal every day person to get a Twitter account. And the question that I bumped into recently was actually more precicely "What is the benefit of using Twitter if you already use Facebook?" so I thought I'd give the answer to that question here too.

Twitter and Facebook are two very different things and can't really be compared, if you ask me. Facebook is a way to keep in touch with old friends (that you long ago decided you didn't have anything in common with anyway, as some cynics would say) and share pictures, videos, interests and all sorts of other, potentially highly uninteresting and quite possibly unnecessary, things with. Twitter is a micro-blog. So instead of asking what the point is of using Twitter if you already use Facebook, you might ask what the point is of using Twitter if you're already blogging. The point would be that with Twitter you update more often and with shorter blurbs about both things that interest you or with what you do. Twitter poses the question "What are you doing?" after all. A lot of tweets (as a post on Twitter is called) are usually a link to content elsewhere instead of something you've written yourself.

Twitter is also a wonderful marketing tool, it's used by a lot of both people and businesses to give others a short update about their life or product/service. When I'm talking about people here I of course mean celebrities, as an example one of the people on Twitter that I follow is Stephen Fry, as he is a funny creative chap that is also very tech savy. He also used to be considered to have a lot of followers. Of course a competition recently put Ashton Kutcher at over 1 million followers (he's got an other over 400k followers since I checked his Twitter last). If you're interested in finding out who else has a large number of followers on Twitter than check out Twitterholic.com

So what would be the point for you or me to get Twitter? None really, it's just the same as with all these other social networking sites or cell phones for that matter. It's an invention that nobody really had a need for when it was invented but once you start using it you find that you can't really be without it. Well that might be a bit of an exaggeration but at least you might find that you enjoy reading blurbs both from your friends and from both organisations, businesses or celebrities. Personally I try to keep away from spammers though, there are some people that tweet 10+ times a day and quite frankly I don't think anybody anywhere lives such an interesting life.

Lastly I can say that the reason I use Twitter is because I'm always looking for things that can potentially bring a smile to my face and reading tweets from both my friends and celebrities has many times managed to do just that. My own Twitter feed can be found here if you for some odd reason would think that I might have anything interesting or funny to say.