The Big Three: Twitter

Twitter is an online social networking and micro blogging service that enables users to send and read "tweets", which are text messages limited to 140 characters. Registered users can read and post tweets, but unregistered users can only read them. Users access Twitter through the website interface, SMS, or even mobile device app. 

            Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Noah Glass and by July 2006, the site was launched. The service rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with 500 million registered users in 2012, who posted 340 million tweets per day. The service also handled 1.6 billion search queries per day. Twitter is now one of the ten most-visited websites, and has been described as "the SMS of the Internet.

Companies use twitter as a way to quickly advertise their brands by posting a tweet about it and allowing their followers to see. One of those followers may see that and ‘retweet’ it resulting his/her followers to see it too. It is an exponential growth.

Another strategy companies use to get the word out is by ‘asking for tweets.’ What is meant by this is companies will have a tweet about ‘if this gets 100 retweets’ someone will win a car.