This fairly new method of communication has taken off in the last few years. What started out as a fun way for teens to share information with friends and network with people from other geographic areas has officially gone to the next level. Sites like My Space and Facebook have grown by as much as 83 percent over the last year according to the Nielson Online survey. This growth is not just a fad. The use of social networking has evolved into a way for advertisers to reach targeted audiences. As incredible as this sounds neither of them is the fastest growing social networking site. A new venue called Twitter is. This new venue is a very simple concept that lets you keep in touch with people by sending very short messages quickly and frequently. The primary topic is “What are you doing”. According to the Nielson Survey Twitter has grown 37,000 percent from the previous year.

Twitter has exploded onto the scene with an established concept of communicating with friends with quick messages. What makes it different from other social networking sites is in the way you communicate. The user is forced to keep messages short. The limit per post is 140 characters. That is about 2 sentences. Sounds a little like texting only with a huge audience. Now it sounds like a very powerful marketing tool.

The way this works is similar to any mass media tool. The trick is to build a large following. The larger the audience the more potential there is to make an impact. Entrepreneurs have figured out how to make this powerful tool work for them in many different industries. Not only that Sports figures, movie stars, and music artists alike have found a way to keep their fan base informed of what they are doing.

Another innovate way to use this technology is education. Twitter in the classroom. One teacher at the University of Texas is using Hash tags to communicate with her students. Hash tags are a community driven tool for adding additional context and Metadata to your tweets. Metadata is simply (data about other data) mostly in the form of a link that is inserted into a post. This allows the professor to organize data and present the topics she wants into a format for discussion. I don't know how successful it is in teaching a subject but it definitely has increased class participation.

Besides Twitter there are many other social networking tools out there. Some are specific to a subject or to an industry. There are industry specific sites like the one for human resource specialists or the one for medical physicians to consult on a diagnosis. The one area social networking has not had a serge in popularity is employee discussions about company business. Most businesses are afraid of the release of proprietary information. Making it easy for competitors to capture and pirate. In fact many of the leading technology companies have warnings to their employees about company restrictions regarding the use of weblogs and public discussion sites when discussing proprietary information.

In any case social networking is around to stay. Two years ago My Space was on top then Face Book came along and the numbers dropped off for My Space. Now Twitter is the new kid on the block and it is exploding. Next year Twitter could be the venue loosing popularity. No matter who is on top Social Networking has its place in America.