7 Lessons Entrepreneurs Can Learn From Twitter’s Success. What did YOU learn?

*Editor’s note: Despite all of Twitter’s issues, and arguments that it will or will not go mainstream, it is undeniable that it has been a huge success. Rohit has some great observations on the factors for their success that we can all learn from. Read on, and as usual, share your thoughts!

rohitbhargava-thumbnail-smb This is a guest posting by Rohit Bhargava (@rohitbhargava), as part of our ongoing efforts to bring insightful content to users. Rohit wrote the award winning Personality Not Included. He’s a Senior Vice President at Ogilvy, and was a founding member of the pioneering 360 Digital Influence team. See original post here

By any measure, the growth and popularity of Twitter has been phenomenal. To say that Twitter has hit mainstream isn’t really the right metric to use. It’s more powerful to note that for a large group of Twitter enthusiasts, to spend even a day without using it would be as bad (or perhaps even worse) than not having email. It has become just that necessary.

How did the site get to this point? And what are the lessons that any entrepreneur might be able to learn from how it got there? Here are a few thoughts on the real secrets behind Twitter’s success:

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Despite ALL the issues, Twitter is still growing exponentially with lots of passionate users. What can we learn from them?

  1. Focus on real time. For the socially connected online, there is little use for yet another place to talk to your friends. If anything, we all have too many of those to start with. But a site dedicated to RIGHT NOW stands out. It’s useful in a way that none of the other sites we use are.
  2. Skip the extra step. Approving every friend request can be a lot of work - even if you’re not the most popular of people. It does make sense on most social networks, but when it comes to posting updates on Twitter, if you do it publicly, anyone can follow you without approval. The result is that any user’s audience on Twitter can grow exponentially without barriers.
  3. Force your customers to do less. If you have ever heard the saying that “less is more” - Twitter is the ultimate proof of that. The forced 140 character messages have made us all refocus on brevity, and as a result of this volume decrease, those of us that are constantly overcommunicated look to the site as the one place where we can still feel that we are on top of the flood of communication that rules our lives.
  4. Build enough evangelists to compensate when things go wrong. One of the most well known facts about Twitter is that the service has been notoriously unreliable and crashed frequently. Though it is much improved from those days, the site still goes down or loses functionality relatively regularly. Yet it has managed to build up enough power users and evangelists, that people forgive their down times and keep coming back.
  5. Integrate with the most popular competition. The single most useful feature I personally uncovered from Twitter was the ability to integrate it into my Facebook page so that may Twitter updates also become my status on Facebook. This demonstrates a fact that many entrepreneurs already know - by integrating with your competition where your “customers” currently are, you make it easier for them to migrate over to your site.
  6. Launch where your influencers are. A big reason for the early success of Twitter was their launch at the SXSW Interactive festival two years ago. It was a place where all the influencers that matters for Twitter were already going to be and putting the site in front of them there allowed them to become word of mouth ambassadors for the site following the event.
  7. Offer a public ranking or authority. The final element that has helped Twitter to succeed is that it has a built in authority ranking with the number of followers you have. This is located right beneath your username on the site and it’s high visibility means that it is easily the ultimate metric for anyone using the site. And you can’t help but want that number to go higher.

This post was republished with permission from the original post on the author’s blog. If you enjoyed this post, you can read more like it on Rohit’s blog at www.influentialmarketingblog.com

Category: Unique Insights

  • i think social networking website like twitter and facebook are success in these modern era due to various reason.Reason's given in the blog are quite satisfactory.
  • Marcanomany
    You got a nice blog up there.

    respect
    james kails
    ______________________________________________
    Provo Homes for Sale | long island wedding djs | Answering service
  • this most important factor i.e Integrate with the most popular competition from facebook.
  • Great Observations ! Twitter has become part of my Business !
  • The ego piece of rank is without the most powerful piece that will really mean a lot more to the owners of popular Twitter pages. Think about how easy it was to get blog rss in the beginning and how much noise you need to swim through now. The same thing should happen to Twitter soon and the early riser will reap the lions share of the market. Great article by the way.
  • I think Twitter is already mainstream. If I'm using it, then it is definitely mainstream!
  • Sandra D.
    None of my customers or potential customers are on Twitter.
    What good does twitter do me?

    It seems most people are selling or pushing their business on Twitter, but where are the customers? Lots of stores talking to each other, nobody listening.

    My tests of moving traffic to my website via Twitter: I have 500+ followers. In a one week period only 37 hits came from Twitter-related traffic.
    I could get more traffic by chaning the keywords in my website meta-tags.
  • salsabor_tropical
    very interesting. I like this article. very informative.
  • salsabor_tropical
    excellent points. thanks for sharing
  • Nice post By Rohit. I made account on twitter but don't get in completely coz i didn't understand the functionality of twitter.
  • John Ferguson
    twitter makes a useful product. People like to connect and twitter allows that, but much of their success is purely in getting brand awareness so far. But what happens when they burn all their cash? The VCs are gonna want ROI. Twitter itself doesn't seem to want to make money, so how long can they keep tapping the VCs?

    Anyway, will twitter last even if it does start to make money? (which even Facebook is finding hard) I love twitter so far. I have found some interesting people to follow and I get arstechnica.com updates thru it. But I suddenly got a surge of followers (barely ten or so, but about double what I had) this weekend and I'm thinking, do I really want all these marketers/SEO/trend harvesters following me? I don't like blocking people arbitrarily, so I spend a minute or 2 looking at the person's tweet history and consider their bio. Some I let follow me without me following them. Some I block. I mean why do they want to follow me? I'm not an internet celebrity. I have some interesting tweets, but not many. Do I want to follow my follower if I don't know him and he has no reputation? Sometimes. Other times I just assume the potential follower is a lazy marketer who doesn't care about me beyond how much more money he can charge his clients because he follows one hundred thousand people and his competitor follows ninety thousand.

    Anyway, my point is, if twitter becomes like work for me as I try to audit my potential followers, I will abandon it (or hide from the public timeline). So would many others. Then what would the marketers/SEO/trend harvesters do to get market data? I suggest they stop following and just use the twitter API to do automated searching on the public timeline.

    If all that was TLDR for you, consider this: your business needs a consistent way to make money WITHOUT venture capital. In that way, twitter is a lesson in how not to do it. Also, if you think you can make money by following tons of people, maybe you can, but you might make more and be more responsive to your customers by being extremely selective in whom you follow and by interacting with them about your product. Make it at least look as if you care about them beyond their money.
  • Great post - I am finding that my Twitter relationships are in many ways more useful than connections I've made through Facebook or LinkedIn. Not to minimize either of those outlets, because I do gain a lot from both - but the information shared freely is astounding.

    You need only ask on Twitter when you are perplexed about anything from a PC problem to a marketing idea to whatever your question may be - and within seconds there are endless folks willing to provide sincere assistance.

    Just be sure to always give back more than you receive! Pay it forward!

    @socialpmchick
  • Great post! Yet.. Don't forget that when this guys launched twitter they probably didn't expect this success or this road the site would take. The flexibility and the speed which how they changed and switched the business to where it was going was a key factor in their success. For entrepreneurs, it's like when Guy Kawasaki said "let the flowers bloom"
  • Excellent job identifying 'lessons' (I'm a big fan of those). A bit of a sidepiece, and very difficult to duplicate is there branding. When competitors emerged, people would say, I signed up at "XYZ microblog", it's like * Twitter*...

    Beyond that the spinoff branding vocabulary is unprecidented. Tweetups, Twestival, Tweeple, on and on. There has to be a new page in the dictionary to accomodate all the new terms.

    As stated, this is difficult to reproduce, but makes for an interesting lesson.

    Keep it coming.
  • I have learned by being on Twitter that, one needs to focus, I don't always follow those who follow me, and I am now strategizing who and where my suspects are. I have 3 different services - this ought to keep me busy. Thank you for the information, especially the ranking.
  • Tom
    I share tweet to share cool things I find interesting and I like visting sites my followers share with me also
  • Well, I will use Twitter to be an entrepreneur.
  • @rohitbhargava-
    @justinrfrench here- i must say you are RIGHT ON with this posting- especially twitter for entrepreneurs- i would be willing to pay for twitter ABSOLUTELY! i hope they dont start charging, but becasue of the growth of my circle of influence, it has helped form a new internet marketing division of my firm and i couldnt me more passionate about how social networking will save small business. Thanks

    p.s. let me know if you want to write a guest post on our blog!
  • Great tips thank you. The explosion if Twitter in the UK continues at a pace. Its all Radio Five Live is talking about and simon Mayo picked up 3500+ followers in a week - I shpould be so lucky! Last week they even covered it on The One Show on BBC1. Twitter is here to stay - even in the UK. Integration to other social media will be key - linkedin in has to be a target?
  • christoph
    Aren't you forgetting a few points? Like "Don't let the absence of a business model stop you"? "If the only way to run it is to burn other people's money, do still go ahead"?

    Content-wise, twitter has become THE leading part of the verbal diarrhea cluttering Web 2.0. Because thanks to twitter, you don't even need to be able to form sentences anymore to "make yourself heard". Brevity? Far from that: twitterites will make up on the 140 character limit by posting 30 messages a day! It's the outlet for people who have no creativity, no words, no imagination - and still somehow want to show up and show off out there. "Scale it down to the point where it meets your audience's skills" - that's the secret of twitter!

    twitter, essentially, means going back to an age where men conversed in short grunts and burps. If you're someone whose communicative skills have always been bad, who doesn't know how to take pictures, how to be funny or elaborate, who's always the odd man out in a conversation: then twitter is for you!

    And the fact that there's many, many millions out there fitting to that target group and sustaining twitter's "success" doesn't make it any better.
  • Excellent article, I think you have really captured some of the main reasons for Twitter's success. I think the point about focussing on real time is often overlooked but is definitely one of the key reasons Twitter has taken off.

    However I'm not sure if I totally agree with last point; at first glance your follower number does look like an indication of authority, but there are many users out there with high follower numbers who aren't really authoritative at all.
  • mingyeow
    not really authoritative at all is an understatement - sometimes, these
    people are complete shams. ;)
    M
  • Great points on #s 2 and 3. When I first started on Twitter I felt restricted by the 140 character limit. Now...I love it for all the reasons you mentioned. The simplicity of the whole thing amazes me. Follow whoever you want with one click...beautiful.
  • Some good points here, especially re: Twitter's simplicity being a major factor, both in adoption rates as well as the endless stream of Twitter integrations, 3rd party add-on services, and other ideas (including the novel linguistic creations!). There is clear power in the Twitter brand name: short, evocative of its purpose, & people somehow like saying/repeating it.

    For more on why simplicity usually wins in business, check out this post:

    http://businessmindhacks.com/post/assorted-robert-scoble-posts-prove-simplicity-wins
  • I agree: the Facebook integration is great, but when will I be able to integrate in other venues?
  • Good post! I would also add that what I have found particularly enjoyable/interesting about Twitter is the whole quest for building your community. It is pretty exciting!
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