How Twitter Marketing Changed Digital Marketing in 2006
Twitter only opened to the public a month ago. Here's what its launch means for marketing, and why the honest answer right now is not much yet.
It would be dishonest to write this piece as though Twitter marketing has already reshaped the industry, because it hasn’t, not yet. The service only opened to the public on July 15, 2006, a month before this was written. What’s worth covering instead is what happened, what it signals and why the businesses paying attention now are positioned well for whatever comes next.
What Twitter is right now
Twitter grew out of a project inside Odeo, a podcasting startup, where Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, Noah Glass and Evan Williams were experimenting with SMS-based status updates. Dorsey sent the first message on the service on March 21, 2006. The public version that launched in July limits posts to 140 characters, a constraint inherited directly from SMS text message limits, and the whole interaction model is built around answering one simple question: what are you doing right now.
That simplicity is exactly why it’s hard to see its marketing potential yet. Most of what shows up on Twitter today reads like exactly what it was designed for: short personal updates among a small, mostly tech-industry crowd who heard about it through Odeo’s network or early tech press coverage.
Why “changed digital marketing” is premature, and worth saying anyway
There’s no advertising product. There’s no business account distinction. There’s no sizable general-audience user base to reach. Any business setting up a Twitter account this month isn’t executing a marketing strategy, they’re staking an early claim and learning the tool before anyone’s built a playbook for it.
That’s the interesting part. Every social platform covered on this site so far, MySpace, the still-expanding Facebook, went through an early period where the platform’s actual use didn’t resemble what it eventually became known for. Being present and paying attention during that period is cheap right now and gets more valuable the longer you wait.
What’s worth doing with it today
Claim your business name as a username while it’s still available; that alone takes five minutes and costs nothing. Beyond that, treat any activity here as observation, not campaign execution. Watch what early adopters post, what format catches on, whether people start using it for anything beyond personal status updates. The tech and media crowd that’s on Twitter right now tends to be an early-warning signal for what the wider internet does eighteen months later.
The honest prediction
A constraint like the 140-character limit, forced by SMS but kept even as the service grows, tends to produce a different kind of communication than longer-form platforms: terser, faster, closer to a live feed than a profile page. If that holds, Twitter could end up better suited to real-time updates, quick announcements and direct back-and-forth than anything MySpace or Facebook currently offer. But that’s a bet on where this goes, not a description of where it is. Right now, the accurate story of Twitter’s effect on digital marketing in 2006 is that it hasn’t had one yet, and the businesses treating this month as the time to quietly learn the platform, not the time to launch a campaign on it, have the right idea.
