7 Ways That Twitter Can Help You (when you don’t have an account)

Good Afternoon, Social Rabbit here with your guide to the world of social media.

Twitter is a social media that lots of people just don’t get how on earth it can be useful for business.  To help those people out here is a list of ways you can use Twitter without ever writing a tweet (that’s what the messages you write on Twitter are called), or even having an account.

1. For Research
   When Twitter users tweet they often include what are called hashtags in their tweets.  Hashtags are basically a word with # before it.  Hashtags can be any word, sometimes a series of words put together, you can make them up, but there are common ones that are used, examples are #facebook, #ipad, #socialmedia, #iwannalivethereuhaveallthefun, #sausagesizzles, #offers, #coupons, #deal, #ausvotes, there are hundreds of them.  The reason that they are great is that you can go to www.Twitter.com and do a search on a hashtag and see what people are saying about it.  You can use this for product research, offers, specials, articles, topics etc…
2. Find out what People are Saying about You
   Use Twitter to search for what is being said about you, your business or your brand.  Many companies say no we aren’t going to get into social media now, but what they don’t realise is that even if you don’t get involved it won’t stop people from talking about you!
3. Follow Events
   Using hashtags you can follow what is happening at events that you can’t attend.  For example recently I went to a Problogger event in Melbourne, the hashtag for the event was #pbevent, there were a lot of people following the twitter stream who couldn’t be there, to find out what was being talked about.  This opens up events to much more people, and no longer means you need to know someone there to find out what happened, you can read about it in real time.
4. Find out what’s Popular
   When you go to www.Twitter.com you can see what is trending now, ie what are the most popular topics that are being tweeted about, for example as I write this #ausvotes is a top trending topic – today is the Australian Election.  This can be useful if for example you want to write a blog post on a current topic.
5. Advanced Search
   If you go to http://search.twitter.com/advanced you can see what was being tweeted on a certain topic in a certain area over certain days.  This is great, for example if you are not sure if your business should be on Twitter go here do a search and see if anyone is talking about your industry in your city/country.  It will help you decide whether you use Twitter or not vs. Facebook or Flickr or YouTube etc.
6. Find out What Celebs are Saying
   You can follow people such as Britney Spears, Dalai Lamah, Bill Gates, President Obama and lots, lots more and get an insight into their daily life, their thoughts and ideas.
7. Get Breaking News
   When events such as the Haiti Earthquake happened, the news was broken first on Twitter with the people who were on the ground, far faster than the journalists.  There were also a number of the relief workers tweeting about their experiences, so you could understand what it was really like.

There are over 100 million people with Twitter accounts and yet only about a third of them are using Twitter regularly.  Next time you have to write a presentation, blog or article try searching on Twitter for the information, it is a great resource, you just have to use it properly.

Hopefully this post has dispelled some of the myth surrounding the thought that Twitter is just people saying “I’m having a coffee!”  If you have any other uses please tell me in the comments.