There’s just something about Q&A. People have questions and they want answers--right now!
As I mentioned when Facebook Questions finally started rolling out to users, there has never been a shortage of Q&A sites on the Web. Back in the day, it was all about Ask Jeeves, but these days pretty much every search engine is used like a Q&A service. Then there’s Quora, ChaCha, Hipster, Yahoo! Answers and a million other new and not-so-new sites for asking and answering questions.
But what about when you want to ask a company something? Do you look up their customer service phone number and give them a ring, or do you turn to the Web? It seems the latter is becoming quite the popular option, especially with the rise of social media.
Six in 10 global Twitter users said they wanted businesses to respond to their questions on Twitter, even when those questions weren’t directly targeted at a specific brand, according to May 2011 research from InboxQ. The figure is slightly higher for users with 100 followers are more, but not by much.
Additionally, eight in 10 users said that answers posted by businesses were at least as trustworthy as those from ordinary individuals.
In spite of all that, only 21 percent of users with under 100 followers and 41 percent of users with 100 or more followers have ever received reply from a business.
So what’s the big deal: if most brands aren’t doing it, then it’s probably not good for business, right? Quite wrong.
Apparently, 64 percent of Twitter users around the world said they would be more likely to make a purchase from a band that answered their question on the microblogging site. Only 24 percent of users said they would be just as likely and (a kind of odd) 12 percent said they would be less likely.
As eMarketer notes, InboxQ has a stake in publishing this kind of data, since the company helps businesses answer questions that concern their brand or industry. But the truth is that social media has always been about greater interactivity, first between friends and family on Facebook, and now between just about anyone on Twitter. And for businesses and brands, that means listening to and responding to customers.
There is one thing that brands have no problem replying to on Twitter, and that’s praise:
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Twitter is an online information network that allows anyone with an account to post 140 character messages, called tweets. It is free to sign up. Users then follow other accounts which they are interested in, and view the tweets of everyone they follow in their "timeline." Most Twitter accounts are public, where one does not need to approve a request to follow, or need to follow back. This makes Twitter a powerful "one to many" broadcast platform where individuals, companies or organizations can reach millions of followers with a single message. Twitter is accessible from Twitter.com, our mobile website, SMS, our mobile apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, our iPad application, or 3rd party clients built by outside developers using our API. Twitter accounts can also be private, where the owner must approve follower requests.
Twitter started as an internal project within the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, and engineer, had long been interested in status updates. Jack developed the idea, along with Biz Stone, and the first prototype was built in two weeks in March 2006 and launched publicly in August of 2006. The service grew popular very quickly and it soon made sense for Twitter to move outside of Odea. In May 2007, Twitter Inc was founded.
Our engineering team works with a web application framework called Ruby on Rails. We all work on Apple computers except for testing purposes.
We built Twitter using Ruby on Rails because it allows us to work quickly and easily--our team likes to deploy features and changes multiple times per day. Rails provides skeleton code frameworks so we don't have to re-invent the wheel every time we want to add something simple like a sign in form or a picture upload feature.
There are a few ways that Twitter makes money. We have licensing deals in place with Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft's Bing to give them access to the "firehose" - a stream of tweets so that they can more easily incorporate those tweets into their search results.
In Summer 2010, we launched our Promoted Tweets product. Promoted Tweets are a special kind of tweet which appear at the top of search results within Twitter.com, if a company has bid on that keyword. Unlike search results in search engines, Promoted Tweets are normal tweets from a business, so they are as interactive as any other tweet - you can @reply, favorite or retweet a Promoted Tweet.
At the same time, we launched Promoted Trends, where companies can place a trend (clearly marked Promoted) within Twitter's Trending Topics. These are especially effective for upcoming launches, like a movie or album release.
Lastly, we started a Twitter account called @earlybird where we partner with other companies to provide users with a special, short-term deal. For example, we partnered with Virgin America for a special day of fares on Virginamerica.com that were only accessible through the link in the @earlybird tweet.
What's next for Twitter?
We continue to focus on building a product that provides value for users.
We're building Twitter, Inc into a successful, revenue-generating company that attracts world-class talent with an inspiring culture and attitude towards doing business.
