 Hello, welcome back. I am Runa as you already know and today I am going to be involved in a bunch of babbles of useless talk. Yes, that is exactly what Twitter means. I am a twit. I just talk about anything in the world like birds do twit twit twit twit twit twit and so on. Interestingly enough, that is what the Twitter site is about. It is a site which allows you to express yourself in as little as 140 characters. It is a micro blog, a micro as a tiny web log which enables you to send and receive messages which you call tweets. Therefore, I said tweet tweet tweet tweet as though you are a bird talking and usually if you call somebody a twit you are calling somebody a little off who does not understand much and that is the whole idea of the Twitter that you express your moment or your idea immediately what am I feeling happy that is a twit excited that is a twit. You can include text, photos and videos in twitters and interestingly Twitter is among the most popular social networking sites after Facebook. Millions of tweets are being shared in real time every day at twitter.com. The nice thing of course is you do not even have to log on to twitter.com. There are applications through which the tweets just pop up on your screen and the idea is because you are a twit you can tweet about anything you like. So, tweet about mundane things and then over time it is about sharing meaningful moments whether they are big or whether they are small and therefore over the years Twitter has evolved to a much more useful tool. Of course you know you are not the only one thinking like me that Twitter is like the dumbest thing you have ever heard of right we just said it's about twits why why would anybody want to tell others what they are doing in just 140 characters. Yet people who disbelieved Twitter made a huge mistake it is incredibly powerful to improve your personal learning and connect with others. Think about it when you are talking face to face when you are involved in a network how often are you giving long speeches often it's you're nodding your head or you're giving a short little statement aha achha q and so on right short little interjections that's what Twitter is about and you use Twitter to find other people and follow their tweets and as I said you could also use Twitter applications like tweet deck so you don't even need to log on to twitter.com you can directly have twits tweet or different people's tweets pop up on your desktop. The success of Twitter revolves around this principle of followers. We as human beings learn to look up to people to believe in people to follow them right when you choose to follow somebody's tweets then that person feels great that person's ego is reinforced and that person works hard to get more and more followers and the more and more followers you get the more successful Twitter is. So Twitter has an inbuilt incentive right the inbuilt incentive is to get followers usually when you choose to follow somebody's tweets the user's tweets will appear in reverse chronological order on the main Twitter page. The lovely thing about Twitter is in a very short time frame it gives you a broad exposure to multi-dimensional issues remember only 140 characters so if you're following 20 different people you'll get a mix of different tweets when you scroll down the page you'll get to know about breakfast cereals you'll get to know about some interesting new links some music recommendation something about the future of education maybe a short idea on technology what's the new mobile phone available and so on all very quickly in bursts of 140 characters. So Twitter is for those people who want to blog who want to tell the world about what they are thinking but they are too lazy to sit and type and type and type so that's the majority of people in the world right who want a blog but don't want to take the effort to do it because they are primarily easygoing so Twitter solves their problems not only that Twitter can be a very very quick way to keep in touch what are the things you can do with Twitter it can expose you to a range of thoughts and wisdom which you had not thought possible before it gives everyone and anyone you can just be on Twitter and that itself means you have a support network it lets you see what the whole world is up to again humans by nature are inquisitive are voyeuristic so you always want to know what is the film star up to where exactly is Ranbir Kapoor vacationing and so on Twitter lets you see that and therefore gives you an outlet like no other and finally because you're having short little bursts of humor your own sense of humor improves significantly here's a sample Twitter page for you as you can see you have Google so you have the latest trends from Google you have the secret to looking great one do you want to sell your AdSense top five money making tips top 10 websites to play with and so on so a whole bunch of random things that you have in here Twitter was developed by Jack Dorsey Evan Williams and Biz Stone and Noah Glass in 2006 so it's not a very old company but it has really really grown with 288 this is a web capture from yesterday 288 million monthly active users 500 million tweets per day 80% are actually mobile users you know the importance of mobile already interestingly it's not America centric 77% of the accounts are outside the US it supports 33 languages okay and all this supported by just 3600 employees just note the power of ICT what are the benefits of Twitter well certainly social messaging right if Amitabh Bachchan sends a quick tweet saying polio Sunday coming up please make sure that you send your child or for polio drops or says you have a huge cough go and you know check whether you have TB or not huge huge way of reaching out to a bunch of people Twitter can again link different communities together so for example you have you know communities which share humor say you have humor about well if I could spell humor about let's see botany so you have a whole bunch of botanists who have actually got together on Twitter and said we're just going to have jokes around our own discipline Twitter works very effectively for live event reporting later I will show you the various uses of Twitter on a pie chart as well often in what on areas you're not able to post long messages but in this case you can have reporters sending in those 140 character images videos and reports Twitter polls are extremely useful quickly to understand how things are going I will talk to you about an education example in this case fairly soon Twitter is among the most useful tools for a PhD supervisor to know where his student is because each time you tweet you give away your location so it's very good both for for example the marketing guy or the sales boss to know where exactly your salesmen are on the field you can if you interact with them through Twitter and certainly same for the students a perfect tool for promotions and popularity again we'll show you some examples in the context of business again communicating and exposure is a big benefit of Twitter Twitter helps you generate leads as we said you know often people don't want to give ideas in terms of a nice long letter but one quick tweet if you follow some important users of your product you could get some interesting leads it can also show your brand's personality now if I'm on Twitter then that what it tells a customer is this company is very agile it's quickly posting messages making changes so it's giving that young and dynamic feel to the product Twitter helps you connect there's a tremendous interconnectivity between customers wholesalers retailers users and the company suppliers all of them can be interconnected through Twitter so you know a comment about a terrible package may hit the supplier and he may think about how to improve the packaging and suggest that to the company much much faster than it would have happened before Twitter is really good to research trends what are people used to you figure out what is trending which color is the color for fashion this year is it purple is it orange is it going to be off-white this summer or should we go with lilacs so those kind of trends Twitter of course is easy to get feedback because it's quick and dirty 140 characters and finally even when you're providing customer service you get the same personal touch when you do it through Twitter you don't have to call us call center and say your call is important to us but our customer service executive is busy with another please wait your call is important to us tune tune tune tune and you have to keep waiting till the call center person gets back instead you just send a tweet and your job is done they tweet back works out much much simpler so that's a huge business benefit that Twitter could give you here's a quick content analysis of Twitter as we said the original idea of Twitter was to give you a place for pointless babble because in reality we are all humans a lot of our interaction is nothing but pointed babble so here you are as 40% of Twitter's tweets are literally pointless a babble interestingly not far behind 38% is actually conversational in nature it's about interaction it's about talking it's about building the social networks that we talked about earlier and 40% 38% is not too bad 8.7% is pass a long value or follow value where hey I discovered that Marx and Spencers has a sale and you pass that information on so about 9% is pass a long value 3.6% is news so when you're talking about what on areas or some breaking news that has just come about 4% comes from Twitter sadly enough Twitter is not free from spam either so about 4% of content on Twitter is nothing but spam and a large portion of Twitter 6% is actually self promotion so Shah Rukh Khan has a movie and then he will tweet about the making of the movie he will tweet about what's good what's bad all simply in the name of self promotion so a large percent of course people want to know because we are humans a large percentage of Twitter again is self promotion so it's a very nice free way of advertising and reaching out just some very quick you know inputs into the language for Twitter this is the reply button so you reply you can comment on a tweet and join the conversation retweet which is share a tweet with your followers a hashtag you assign a topic to a tweet so the whole set comes together you favour it a tweet by giving it a star mark this is how this is what you click to compose a tweet when you have a notification you get this alarm bell here's a message you change your profile you use this to follow people that you enjoy so to start your own Twitter account start by building a voice start retweeting start replying start reacting don't start with your own tweets start with using other people's tweets then when you're writing your own tweets remember to mention and include others in your content see what you want is you want more and more followers right that's the purpose of the tweet so if you want more and more followers you've got to include other people as you proceed so that's what you will do and as you learn to get to use Twitter better then start exploring its fancy advanced features like images and videos direct messages and connect Twitter to the others important thing is if you want to be part of the Twitter RT right you've got to regularly engage and contribute in a meaningful way not just once or twice but regularly the coolest thing about Twitter however is that even unregistered users can read tweets so we can access Twitter to the website interface sms mobile device anything and we don't even need to be registered to see the tweets and as a result it's very very good for sentiment research so just two quick anecdotes there was this Twitter classroom experiment as you know you have all these kids in class who just can't be separated from their cell phone and they come into the lecture hall and they're still sms-ing and texting and doing Facebook and so on so a particular teacher decided to take advantage of that and set up a Twitter handle for his course and when he was making a presentation two-thirds of the screen was his PPT and one-third of the screen was left behind for tweets and he told the students feel free to tweet on my course so by allowing that as he taught you had the series of tweets keeping on coming down right so as he taught the advantage was that these students had started interacting on the tweet rather than raising their hand and asking a question they kept typing their tweets and kept having conversations so it promoted a whole bunch of interaction maybe it took away something from the teacher more importantly what the teacher realized was he could not cover everything that he wanted to cover but whatever portion of this topic that he did teach did manage to teach between the tweets it was a discovery for the students they really learnt so that's one example of how Twitter could be used in the classroom another example that I want to bring to you is of course two major film actresses you have Deepika Padukone and you have Priyanka Chopra both are huge Twitter users of the two Priyanka possibly posts a tweet every five minutes or every hour she's very very active on Twitter I'm doing this I'm jumping here doing my nails all the things keep coming on as tweets Deepika on the other hand usually is quiet and every time she has a movie coming in or she has an interview on TV that she wants to discuss she puts up the tweets which of them are more popular any ideas who has the greater fall number of followers well interestingly Deepika now although remember she's a very purposeful self-promoting Twitter right as compared to Priyanka who's always posting little messages so that brings out the question to what the other Twitterers are looking for are they looking for just trivia about yourself or they are actually using the tweets to follow you to know what is what is it you're doing next and then pick that up so that was just my little anecdote for you once again like we talked about social networks privacy and security is going to be a huge concern Twitter messages are public users can send private messages note Twitter collects personally identifiable information and shares it and please note that if the company changes hands Twitter can sell this information as an asset advertisers are allowed to target users based on their history of tweets there have been instances of hacking of Twitter accounts Twitter now offers a feature that allows tweets to be removed selectively by country also there is a do not track privacy option that Twitter has now put in place not necessarily on all browsers but certainly on the Firefox browsers so once again important to keep privacy and security issues at hand again here are some more websites that you should find interesting which also talk about different ways of using Twitter thank you very much and we'll see you later bye bye