Though Facebook/Orkut/MySpace and other Social networking sites had a status update feature, it was intended to actually share current location or an activity. It wasn’t really meant for sharing small thoughts, titbit information
This was when Twitter was launched. The power and impact of 140 characters in a tweet was phenomenal and unbelievable. It gave people a direct chance to express themselves, but within a line or two. At first, people didn’t really have a clue on what should be done. It took a couple of weeks for them to get a hang of it
Wit, Brevity and Knowledge ruled here. It wasn’t a place for boring people. Long essays and boring paragraphs with lot of content was replaced by 1 line headline with probably a link to the main article. Those who liked the article simply liked the tweet or retweeted to their followers.
Impact for Influencers: The impact of twitter was largely felt by social media influencers and brands. These two came together to create a unified communication for their campaign. Each social media influencer had at least 10,000+ people following them, which gave a huge boost to the product’s paid tweet. Sometimes it was disguised nicely under a normal tweet and got more visibility and shares. While Facebook charged corporate accounts for every post (around 5$) , it was actually free in Twitter. This made companies retweet every post that mentioned positively about them and effectively promoted their image
Sentiment Analysis Impact: Machine learning algorithms were later developed by data scientists, which could easily identify the sentiment of the tweet. It could be positive, negative or even a neutral statement. This gave a clear impact rating of their net business through sentiment scores. The firms quickly setup customer support teams, primarily for twitter and responded to every single negative tweet.