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[Picture: Samira Moodie]
It’s official, I am now a Twitterer. In fact I’ve been Tweeting for the past two days.
Please, save those unkind comments. For so are all my colleagues at The Moodie Report. In fact our Irish Deputy Publisher Dermot Davitt did his first Tweet yesterday and they’re already talking about it, maybe even Tweeting about it, in the bars of Galway where he lives (well he lives in Galway, not the bars – or so he claims).
The Moodie Report Twitter is born. And boy, are you in for a Tweet.
For the uninitiated (and there are many of us), Twitter is a free social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as ‘Tweets’. Or so Wikipedia tells us.
So what’s a Tweet? No it’s nothing to do with Sylvester the cat and Tweety Bird of Looney Tunes fame. In fact it’s a text-based post of up to 140 characters (if you think that’s a lot, try it – it isn’t) displayed on the author’s page and delivered to the author’s subscribers. They are known as ‘followers’.
Moodie Twitter followers, for example, can send and receive tweets via a free subscription to our Twitter feed (http://twitter.com/themoodiereport)
So what appears on our Tweets? Firstly the headlines from our main web stories – so you can keep up with the news on the run.
And secondly, perhaps more importantly, some snapshot impressions (remember, in 140 characters or less, including spaces between words) of what we see as we roam the airport and travel retail world, or as we assess industry’s key developments each day. We’ve even got some surprises in store so please subscribe now – it’s very straightforward.
In essence Twitter is an information network. It tells people what they care about as it is happening in the world.
No sooner had I sent my first Tweet from my iPhone yesterday than World Duty Free, no less, responded with their own Tweet back – We saw your first iPhone tweet! Brilliant! (Incidentally that’s just 42 characters – excellent economy of words by the retailer).
We like the way World Duty Free is using Twitter to promote brand launches, events, competitions, polls and so on.
Dubai Duty Free has a Twitter feed too; so do Mauritius Duty Free, ATU Duty Free and, we suspect, many others.
The Moodie Report’s Brands Editor Mary Jane Pittilla is a passionate advocate of Twitter. She told me how UK fashion house was so impressed by the influence of TV Alexa Chung’s fashion Tweets that they launched a handbag (The Mulberry Alexa) via that medium. It’s proved to be a smash hit.
“It seems to me a powerful way of communicating in just a few words,” says Mary, using just 66 characters to convince me…
And boy how it works. Cosmetics house Smashbox mentioned a story by The Moodie Report about a product launch on its Twitter feed, immediately spawning a wave of traffic to our website – and hopefully a surge of consumer interest in the line.
Within a day of our launch this week we had 34 followers and we’re expecting a whole lot more as we come to terms with the best way to use the service.
So listen out. As I said, you’re in for a treat. I mean a Tweet.