A Practical Guide to Twitter Marketing
A mechanics-first look at how Twitter worked for businesses in 2008, from its 140-character SMS roots to the few companies using it for support and sales.
Twitter had been public for two years by 2008, but most business owners had never opened it. The service grew out of a text-messaging side project, and that SMS heritage still shaped everything about how it worked: posts were capped at 140 characters, partly so a tweet plus a phone number prefix would fit inside a single text message. Understanding that constraint is the fastest way to understand why Twitter marketing in 2008 looked nothing like a Facebook Page or an email newsletter.
How a tweet moved
There was no algorithm deciding what you saw. If you followed an account, its posts appeared in your timeline in the order they were posted, full stop. Following someone didn’t require their permission and they didn’t have to follow you back. That one-way follow model is what made Twitter usable as a broadcast and listening tool at the same time: a company could publish updates to whoever chose to follow it, and separately track any mention of its name by searching for it, whether or not the person mentioning it was a follower.
Two conventions carried almost all of the interaction. The @reply, typing another user’s name with an @ in front of it, sent a message that showed up in that person’s mentions and was visible to anyone who looked. The retweet, manually typing “RT @username” in front of someone else’s post and reposting it, was the only way to share someone else’s tweet with your own followers. Twitter wouldn’t build an official retweet button until late 2009. Hashtags existed by 2008 but were still an informal convention proposed by users, not a feature Twitter itself supported with search or trending pages.
Most people managed all of this through the Twitter website or basic third-party apps like Twitterrific, since Twitter’s own mobile experience was thin and tools like TweetDeck were only just arriving. There was no verification badge, no promoted tweets and no advertising product of any kind. Every account looked the same regardless of size.
What businesses were doing with it
The handful of companies experimenting with Twitter in early 2008 used it in one of two ways. Dell ran an account, @DellOutlet, that posted discount codes for refurbished and clearance computers, essentially treating followers like a subscriber list for a running clearance sale. Comcast, more famously, put a support technician named Frank Eliason on Twitter that spring to search for people complaining about their cable service and respond directly, a practice that had no name yet but would later be called social customer service.
Neither of these was a campaign with a budget or a media plan. They were a single employee or a small team using a free tool to do something a phone line or an email inbox did more slowly: find the conversation already happening about the brand and join it.
What this meant for a business trying it in 2008
If you wanted to try Twitter marketing in 2008, the mechanics dictated the approach more than any strategy deck could. Because there was no advertising, the only way to grow an audience was to be worth following, which meant posting things people wanted to see: real discounts, real answers to real complaints or a useful voice. Because there was no algorithm, consistency mattered more than any single post going viral. And because the total number of active users was still small compared to a channel like email or even MySpace, the honest expectation for most businesses wasn’t reach. It was learning the mechanics early, before the tools, the ad products and the audience caught up.
