4 years ago, a select number of people knew what twitter was or how it was used. Currently however, there are over 100 million users registered on twitter with a daily growth rate of over 100,000 users. According to facts about twitter, there are around 640 tweets sent per second on twitter. For a lot of users, twitter is simply about following celebrities to see what they’re up to in their lives, but for some, including the celebrities, twitter is a form of marketing and promotion that is growing at an amazing rate each. It’s hard to believe that a service which allows users to send messages of 140 characters at a time over the internet could become so popular but since it’s creation in 2006, its popularity has skyrocketed.
I’d like to examine a specific case in this blog. That case is the UFC’s (Ultimate Fighting Championship) use of twitter. The president of the company, Dana White, was one of the first people in the company to start using twitter and he now has close to 1.2 million users following him. He uses twitter as a way of interacting with the fans (in a way which otherwise would be much more difficult), giving fans a behind the scene look of UFC operations as he tweets pictures of his work days, announcing news about the UFC, and even giving away tickets to events during fight weeks. Take one example that happened a couple months ago to show you the power of twitter and how it can be used for marketing and promotional events. In the days leading up to the big fight, Dana White tweeted that he was at a Dave and Busters and that he would be giving away tickets to the event for people that came to meet him there. Within seconds of tweeting this, fans were already at the Dave and Busters saying they had saw his tweet and were looking for tickets. The video below is from his official video blog and shows just how quickly fans started to come in looking to get their hands on tickets to the fights ( starting at 4:40 )
The UFC has caught on to the twitter boom by giving twitter seminars to all of their fighters which allows for more interaction between the fans and the fighters. The reason I chose to blog about Twitter and the UFC this week is because it is amazing the power that a program allowing you to send a 140 character message over the internet can have but I expect that over the next few years, more and more companies will catch on to this and Twitter will continue to expand at as it has done in the past few years.