Micro blogging, as it is classified, is described by Wikipedia as:

“form of multimedia blogging that allows users to send brief text updates.”

Over the past few months Twitter has formed part of a large majority of the online community’s social realm. This quasi-public platform allows for members to “tweet” up to 140 characters and instantly reach their following which could be up to 2000 people (the initial limit is set to prevent spamming) “Tweets”, the online equivalent of an sms, can be “RT”, retweeted, and sent to the “retweeters”  following, thus having an exponential viral effect.

Twitter carries a cache of potential to reach your target market and best of all its free. That spells catch, there has to be a catch? Well, it depends how you want to look at it. The market is out there, receptive and eager to communicate and the platform is there, ready and waiting to be utilised. It all boils down to interfacing with that untapped market. Apps have been developed to do this but the ones out there are blunt instruments bashing away at the social dynamics, they serve their purpose (as social tools) but they create a mass flurry of clutter in a small space, constantly.

So Twitter is purely social and of no use to businesses, right? Wrong. Todd Dagres, founder of Spark Capital and one of the VCs that poured an additional $35 million into Twitter was quoted by ReadWriteWeb, saying: “All of a sudden there will be some changes that won’t undermine the experience or the vitality — but it will be pretty obvious how we’re going to monetize it.”

Twitter has the business potential; it has had 34.7% positive growth since last month (Compete.com), so now it’s all about having the right tools to reach the right people with the right message at the right time.

A post by TechCrunch highlighted the possibility of having vanity URLs on Facebook in the future.

Vanity URLs, in short, are the customised URLs of your page/blog on another community platform, like Facebook. They point directly to your page and dont conform to the hosts generated path i.e. www.facebook.com/[your businessname] instead of the path assigned by Facebook.

Though Facebook is allowing vanity URLs they have been limited to either bands, the super famous or business partners.

“Unfortunately we are not currently able to approve requests for vanity URLs (web addresses). The only Pages that presently have vanity URLs are bands and businesses that partnered with us for the initial launch of this new product. We hope to make these URLs available for everyone to have on their individual Page(s) in the future. When this feature is available, we will provide instructions on how to obtain a vanity URL on this help page.”

 I hope to see this come about sooner rather than later. It will be great for business to “customise” their current pages as well as taking your Facebook page offline onto business cards, letterheads and other offline branded material.

Is it really that important? Consider having, for example, http://www.facebook.com/formfunction, it is compact therefore brandable as well as clear and understandable. Compare it to the actual link: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/home.php?filter=pp. A lot less distinct. Vanity URLs also give ownership to the brand page. So to answer the question - yes, I think it is important, especially for your business and its online presence.

Besides, after the latest Facebook upgrade why isn’t it there? Twitter has it, Myspace has it and LinkedIn has it.

Lets hope Facebook plays catch-up and gives business the opportunity to stand loud and proud (and branded).