If you printed Twitter:
• It would cover 350 MILLION sheets of paper which is 37X more the number of pages used in Bills introduced to US Congress since 1955.

If you printed Twitter:
• The paper would weigh 3.5 MILLION pounds- the equivalent of 82 school busses loaded with 84 kids
If you printed Twitter:
• 7 Billion tweets are composed of approximately 104,860,000,000 words which is the equivalent of approximately 133,000 copies of the King James version of the Bible.

If you printed Twitter:
• And spent every workday doing nothing but reading tweets, it would take 2912 years to finish.

If you printed Twitter:
• All the pages of your printing, laid end to end, would stretch 60, 763 miles; equivalent to 2.5 times around the globe.

If you printed Twitter:
• It would cost you $24,500,000 using an average ink jet printer with only black ink. To add the Twitter blue, that total jumps up to $55,606,250.

If you printed Twitter:
• Keeping up with only 26 Million Tweets a day would require 30 Inkjet printers working around the clock to print over 1,300,000 pages daily.

Are you sitting down?
The facts and figures you just read are from 2010. It is now 2011 and those numbers are increasing exponentially EVERY DAY! How big is Twitter? Try it and see.

Image via Wikipedia

Twitter is rapidly becoming one of the most popular avenues used by businesses to build their client base and bring awareness to their services and offerings. Twitter is not a trend, it’s a tool- A powerful tool to quickly connect and bring your marketing potential to the next level.

Here are some figures from just one year ago:

• Twitter now has 105,779,710 registered users.
• New users are signing up at the rate of 300,000 per day.
• 180 million unique visitors come to the site every month.
• 75% of Twitter traffic comes from outside Twitter.com (i.e. via third party applications.)
• Twitter gets a total of 3 billion requests a day via its API.
• Twitter users are, in total, tweeting an average of 55 million tweets a day.
• Twitter’s search engine receives around 600 million search queries per day.
• Of Twitter’s active users, 37 percent use their phone to tweet.
• Over half of all tweets (60 percent) come from third party applications.
• Twitter itself has grown: in the past year alone, it has grown from 25 to 175 employees.
As of September, 2011, here are some new figures:

• The microblogging service has a total of 200 million registered users
• Some 55 million users log on to Twitter from their phone or tablet every month
• Twitter.com now sees 400 million visitors a month, up from 250 million at the beginning of the year
• Twitter now hosts roughly a billion tweets every five days
• 230 million tweets every day
• The latest new record number of tweets per second is 8,900- set when Hurricane Irene hit New York and Beyonce announced her pregnancy.

That last stat shows the reach and diversity of the power of twitter. Imagine what it could be doing for your business.

Related articles

• Top 9 Twitter Apps For Higher Efficiency (kylelacy.com)
• 5 Twitter Tips to Give Your Content More Exposure (hubspot.com)
• 6 Ways to Capitalize on Twitter’s Promoted Tweets (hubspot.com)

A recent Comscore article shows that Facebook and Twitter Access via Mobile Browsers has Grows by Triple-Digits in the Past Year, which really shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. I don’t know about you- but it seems that everyone I talk to these days has an iPhone, Droid, or Blackberry.

The rise of mobile technology has some neat (and somewhat frightening, in the Big Brother-sense) implications for how we can be targeted by marketing/advertising. Applications like Foursquare publishes your location to the world, which could allow a monitoring application to watch for anyone who “checks-in” at specific locations.  Think about the implications of checking-in on Beale Street in Memphis on a Saturday night, and then getting a reply that offers you no-cover entrance, or 2-for-1 on your first cocktail at a nearby blues club?

Consider what that technology could that do for restaurants: giving them the ability to offer location-specific specials for lunch or dinner?  What about B2B organizations (a lot of whom seem to be struggling with ways to use social media tools) who want to target locally?  It would be relatively simple for an application to cross-reference someone’s check-in location (like in your company’s office complex, for instance) with specific keywords in a Twitter profile data.  I could then send a message to anyone who is listed as a CMO or Director of Marketing that checks in at Memphis’ business incubator, Emerge Memphis, a message that said “Good to see you in our neck of the woods. If you’ve got 10 minutes, stop by and we’ll show you something neat that we’re up to”.

Alright, I may want to put a little more thought into that message itself, but the point is: I can get hyper-specific with who I am targeting and what messaging I send to that person.

A Better Mobile Web
My other thoughts on the rise of mobile are nothing new – I love that mobile technology gives us so much freedom and instant access to information, but I hate that web site (not app) developers are not catering more to mobile users.

Web sites need to get smarter!  This presentation from Razorfish’s John Petengill points out how mobile users do not want their Internet experience to be watered down. Check it out – very short, but powerful (plus its a really cool presentation).

Valeo is proposing an optional, mobile-friendly version of every with every new site project that we have pitched in the last 6 months.  Why wouldn’t you want a mobile site if you’re developing a new web presence?  Give mobile users a better experience, because their numbers will continue to rise.

There’s a lot of hype about having a mobile app, and there are some great companies who have developed an application that will build mobile apps for you. Our neighbors, Resolute Interactive, has developed their Appanda software that allows you to design and publish your own iPhone and Android app through a web interface. (Shameless plug: check out Valeo’s app on iTunes that was built using Appanda)

This is a break through for anyone who doesn’t want to hire someone like Resolute or Valeo to build you a custom app, but don’t forget about your website, which still has the power to drive far greater amounts of traffic to your online presence. Having your own mobile app is great – but between a mobile app, and a mobile-friendly version of your site, which do you think has more potential?  I’ll give you a hint- mobile apps are not showing up in search engine results…

Looking to the Future
Not huge in the States yet, but sure to be crossing the oceans and coming here soon, I think QR codes will play some part in the mobile future.  I’m not quite ready to talk about that yet – but we’re working up some ideas, so I’m sure we’ll have something for you sometime this year.  Stay tuned…

Some interesting reading about Foursquare:

• Facebook About to Drop a Bomb on Foursquare? (socialmediatoday.com)
• foursquare fascination (timesunion.com)
• Putting Foursquare-esque Technology to Work… at Work (socialmediatoday.com)

The Auto DM is a greatly debated subject in the Twittersphere.  Some people don’t mind them, some hate them with a passion, and there is obviously a huge number of people that are using them.  If you’ve attended the recent workshops on my PLET method for Twitter, then you’ll know that I’m an advocate of some of the features that SocialOomph affords (such as emailed tweet keyword searches).

However, I get really burned out on seeing a “nice to tweet you” or “thanks for joining my Tweeple on Twitter” messages. It’s not authentic, and it annoys me; but my purpose for this post is not to debate the validity of the Auto DM. There are plenty of other sites for that purpose, like StopAutoDM.com. My goal here is to show you how to [at least] opt out of the Auto DMs that are powered by SocialOomph:

1)  Log in to Twitter.
2)  Follow @OptMeOut.
3)  Wait for @OptMeOut to follow you back. @OptMeOut will send you a DM to tell you it has followed you.
4)  Then send a DM to @OptMeOut. (You can write whatever you want in the DM, it does not matter.)
5)  After sending the DM, unfollow @OptMeOut. (This way your opting out remains private since you won’t be in the list of @OptMeOut’s followers. We will unfollow you as well.)

Pretty simple!  This will at least block some of the silly messages.  Good luck!