I’ve become a big fan of Twitter, the short-message communication channel that lets you broadcast 140-character messages to a wide range of readers. It’s one more channel for communicating with customers and prospects and for networking with peers, LinkedIn and Facebook, the social-media aggregator FriendFeed, and others.
Email provides the template for how to use new communication channels successfully. All the issues that can either help you fail spectacularly or become a messaging superstar–such as growing a list of quality followers and providing high-value content–have already been dealt with in email and can be applied to emerging channels.
You need only leverage what you’ve learned about successful email marketing to start out at a higher competence level than others who don’t have the same background and can end up making the same mistakes that plagued emailers in the early years.
Twitter and email share many similarities, which I lay out in my latest Email Insider column, “Twitter: Email with a 140-Character Limit?” Seeing these similarities will help reinforce best communication practices, no matter whether you’re emailing, Twittering, tagging links in your Delicious feed or posting material on your company’s Facebook page.
Have you begun Twittering yet? Please share your experiences here or list any other similarities between Twitter and email that I might have overlooked. I also welcome you to follow my tweets; sign up for an account here if you don’t already have one, then find my Twitter home here.
