The 140 character post has taken the world by storm. Twitter growth is currently trending at 965% year over year and predicted to be at 100 million users by end of 2009. This is a uniquely valuable channel to marketers, for both broadcasting your message and mining data to gauge your position in the market. It is more important than ever to understand the Twitter audience, both the Tweeters and the consumers of tweets.

A few interesting facts about user behavior from a analysis done by Sysmos:
- 85% of Twitter users post less than one tweet per day
- 93.6% of users have less than 100 followers, while 92.4% follow less than 100 people
- 5% of Twitter users account for 75% of all activity
- More than 50% of all updates are published using tools, mobile and Web-based, other than Twitter.com. TweetDeck is the most popular non-Twitter.com tool with 19.7% market share.

Social Media breaks down the barriers of a traditional marketing mindset. Instead of telling the audience what you want it to think the audience tells you. In a nutshell it is the new media powered by platforms that allow for people having conversations online. Sites like Wikipedia have logged almost 4,000,000 articles published to date, all by the community. Youtube, 100,000,000 videos, 100% community. Second Life, 1,500,000 residents and its own economy… The list goes on.

Why should you care? As a member of todays society chances are that 57% of people you meet are on some type of social network. 73% of them have read a blog, 45% of them have their own and can go home and blog about your conversation. Social Media is a fundamental shift in the way we communicate. The walls are down, point to point has become point to many. Time for you and your brand to join the conversation