Why I Use Twitter (And You Should Too!)
Posted by Brian Cantwell on Wed, Jun 17, 2009 @ 10:44 AM
Yesterday my MIT Sloan classmate @amandapey (check out her b-school blog) tweeted about a study that compared click-through rates on links posted to Twitter and links posted to Facebook. Twitter blew Facebook away with nearly double the click-throughs, despite having 7x smaller test audience. That got me thinking about why I use Twitter and what I find so useful about it.
One of the biggest problems I have as a b-school student is information consumption. When I was working as a consultant, I could focus my information consumption efforts on general news (NYT) and sources relevant to my job - mainly marketing (AdAge, Colloquy), consumer products (GMA Smart Brief), and the 5-10 weekly newsletters and research findings that my company sent out.
For me, the whole point of b-school has been to broaden my knowledge base and experiment with multiple areas of expertise. In order to stay on top of the most relevant information I need to consume information on a much wider variety of topics than ever before. RSS feeds, daily emails, article aggregation sites like Digg and Reddit, and the major news media outlets are either overwhelming or insufficient. In this age of distributed information, there really was no one-stop-shop source for the best content... until Twitter.
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Cartoon Credit
I go to Twitter to click on links. By following people who represent all of my interests (entrepreneurship, the MIT $100K, business school, social media, web/tech, marketing, the red sox, boston events, wine, and, of course, my future wife) and setting up saved searches for my favorite topics, I get a real-time stream of relevant information so that I can stay on top of trends and the latest news. I'm not surprised that Twitter had a much higher link click-through rate than Facebook, because that is exactly what I use Twitter for. I log in to Facebook to see what my friends are up to. I log in to Twitter to find and filter information - and information usually comes in the form of a link.
As I've mentioned before, I wish I had known about Twitter before b-school so that I could have engaged with the MBA community before setting foot on campus. If you are in b-school or heading there in the fall, I would definitely recommend getting active on Twitter. Hopefully you'll find it as useful as I have.