Everyone seems flummoxed by Twitter. While I don’t profess to understand the psychology behind it, I admit I’m addicted to the mini-blogging service, which limits posts to 140 characters.
And I’m not alone.
I’m joined by thousands of mobile food vendors, food fans, Food Network stars, independent restaurant owners and food behemoths like Pizza Hut. We’re all trying to figure out how best to use it, how our “followers” use it and what its future holds after celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and Oprah Winfrey tire of the format.
The immediacy intrigues me: I learned of Michael Jackson’s death and the recent bombings at hotels in Jakarta, Indonesia, long before the mainstream media started broadcasting the news. I also followed Tweets sent by protesters after the elections in Iran for a firsthand account of the events.
And because I started my career as a copy editor and headline writer, Twitter’s brevity appeals to my short attention span and interest in synthesizing ideas into easily digestible sentences.
I get all Twitter has to offer on my phone, so location matters no more, and I get daily updates from our own @NRNOnline Twitter feed.
I also tweet out the newsy tidbits I gather, such as the July announcement that Dover Downs Hotel & Casino in Dover, Del., posted a billboard along Route 50 near Washington, D.C., urging passers-by to “follow” the company and offering free slot play credits at the casino.
“Twitter has become, for us at least, a great way to interact with a vocal and vibrant segment of our customer base,” says Gloria Hammelef, senior director of marketing at Dover Downs. “We’ve been able to reach out to people via Twitter who might have been unaware of us otherwise.”
I also follow Ann Handley, editor of MarketProfs and an informational Twitter treasure trove at @marketingprofs, who recently wrote that she finds food-cart vendors to be among the most savvy of tweeters.
The vendors are good at these rules of Twitter:
Find your target market. Cultivate the right “followers.” Create demand. Be humorous or provide useful information. Humanize your brand. Reveal a little personality. Gather customer feedback. Ask your patrons what they want. Run promotions. Build anticipation about what the next one might be. Create a sense of community. Host “Tweet-up” gatherings. Integrate your efforts. Link into other social media platforms, such as Facebook, your website, Flickr photo sharing and/or YouTube.
For all of these reasons, I’m ending this column not only with my e-mail address, but my Twitter contact as well: