[The Three Social Networks You Should Master]

Social media may sound like one thing, but there are many different kinds. As of March 2017, the main social networks in widespread use are:

★ Facebook
★ Twitter
★ Instagram

— those three.
In our previous article we covered The Three Social Networks You Should Master: Facebook Edition, and in this article we bring you the Twitter Edition.

We'll cover Twitter's features and tips for using it in business, so if you think "I'm on Twitter more or less, but I'm not sure whether it's actually effective" or "I'm thinking of starting to use Twitter and want to know the best way to go about it," please use this as a reference.

[Twitter's Features and Tips for Using It]

With Twitter, it seems many people say, "I've heard of it, but I don't use it myself."
That's because Twitter's main user base is young people in their teens and 20s.

However, Twitter has considerable reach, and if used well, information can spread to thousands or even tens of thousands of people at astonishing speed.

With Facebook, when you click "Like," the friends of the person who liked it are also notified, but as a basic premise, the information does not reach people who aren't friends (including friends of friends). Connecting in advance is essential.

Twitter, by contrast, does have follow/follower relationships, but there are multiple routes—trends, search and so on—by which a single tweet can be discovered.

What's more, if someone with tens of thousands of followers whom you aren't directly connected to happens to come across your tweet through a chain of connections, likes it and shares it, your information instantly reaches those tens of thousands of followers as well.

I once tweeted using the hashtag of a certain event (a keyword beginning with #), and that hashtag made it into the trends; it spread so widely that my notifications wouldn't stop.

Looking back on it calmly afterwards, it seemed that Kojiharu of AKB48 had also been following that hashtag and reading various tweets. (I suspect a big part of why it spread was that Kojiharu tweeted, "This hashtag is hilarious.")

As you can see, Twitter has real reach, and sometimes information spreads explosively.

But don't forget the user demographics we mentioned earlier.
No matter how far information can spread, if you send out content aimed at an age group that barely uses the platform, you're unlikely to get the results you hoped for.