Twitter's Growing, But Is It a Marketing Tool?

The platform’s growing, but is it a marketing tool? Talk about a disruptive technology: Twitter’s currently disrupting plenty, from Jennifer Aniston’s romance with singer John Mayer (rumored to be a tweeting addict) to Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban’s $25,000 fine for griping—in 140 characters or less—about the refereeing at a recent game.

The Twitter tech platform has exhibited astounding growth in recent months, increasing its unique visitors an amazing 1382% from Feb. 2008 to Feb. 2009, according to Nielsen NetView. That makes it the fastest growing community on the Internet, hands down.

But what marketers can do to take advantage of that growth remains unclear—as in fact does Twitter’s path to its own profitability. Plenty of brands monitor the platform for conversations that relate to them, of course; both Comcast and Dell use Twitter as a CRM tool.

But other companies are finding ways to incorporate Twitter as part of their social media campaigns. Usually these efforts involve simply informing their most loyal customers of events, deals and announcements from the company. Carnival Cruise Lines maintains a Twitter account and used it in March to spread and Facebook. For example, entrants were asked to provide creative answers to why they deserved to travel to the U.S. Open, using “TurboTax” in their updates. Winners were chosen based on both their creativity and the reach of their updates to friends.

And Microsoft has allied with Twitter and blog publisher Federated Media on ExecTweets, a service that will let followers register to listen in on the aggregated micro-thoughts of executives from major brands and organizations.

Including, inevitably, Mark Cuban, who quipped: “can’t say no one makes money from twitter now. the nba does.”