Twitter: Web 2.0 Complaint Box

Have you ever update your Twitter status and get replies or new followers instantly? Well that’s the result of the Twitter Search. I never realized the potential until I’ve read these articles; How to Combine Business and Twitter and 50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business.

Social media such as Twitter and Facebook has become the most influential technology in 2009 and perhaps going to be bigger in 2010. I just want to share few things about using Twitter Search, which has become useful tool for most companies to listen to your complaint and suggestion.

For Twitter users, you can simply update your status about certain products and services, give a poor review, feedback and complain in 140 characters. You can include the hash (#) tag if you want to.

Some local companies (whether they have Twitter account or not) will be able to track down your complaint instantly by using the Twitter Search. I’ve tried it myself and its quite useful. But it requires few keyword and search string/operators to get more accurate search. For instance, people who works for Telekom Malaysia and they want to find what customers think about Streamyx service. Just go to Twitter Search and type ‘streamyx’. You can also search from the sidebar of your Twitter’s page and save the search.

Because of this reason, Twitter makes profit by selling the searches to Google and Microsoft. Previously, people rely on Google and bloggers rely on high pagerank to get this done. Well, Twitter breaks the rule. You don’t need to have many followers to get in the cloud. You just have to update your status! This is the main thing Facebook doesn’t have.

The scenario might changed in the future, who knows.

P/S – preferred Seesmic as my Twitter client for now