Twitter Power 3.0. Comm Joel

high. We didn't talk among ourselves, and we weren't part of the conversation; we were talked to by writers, editors, and producers who controlled the conversation. If we liked what we were reading, we kept tuning in, and the publishing company made money.

      If we didn't like it, we stopped buying the magazine, or we switched channels. Advertisers turned away, and all the millions of dollars the publication took to create disappeared.

      Today, it's all very different. It now costs as little as nothing more than time to create great content and make it available for other people to enjoy. That low cost means that it doesn't matter if millions or even thousands do not read it if your target market is smaller or nascent. The rise of social media means you can profitably focus on even tiny markets – such as stamp collectors in Mozambique – and still find enough people to form an online community and profit through advertising and product sales.

      The buzzword for this rise of small and micro communities, as Wired editor Chris Anderson coined it, is the long tail, and it's absolutely been rocket fuel for our Internet race to the moon.

      But the lowered barrier to entry for publishing online has had another positive effect: We aren't being talked to by professional writers and publishers anymore; we're talking to each other.

      Average folk like you and me – the kind of people who didn't study writing at college, who never spent years as cub reporters covering local court cases or high school sports, and who were never even very good at Scrabble or Words with Friends – are now writing about the topics they love and sharing their views and opinions online.

      And they're hearing from their readers, too. The conversation is flowing in both directions.

      Anyone can now launch a website or blog, write articles, share their thoughts and views on Facebook or other social media, or even create videos and upload them to YouTube. And anyone can comment on that content, affecting both its nature and the direction of the publication.

      That's social media; it's a publishing revolution, and we're smack-dab in the middle of it!

What Exactly Is Social Media?

      Social media can be all sorts of different things, and it can be produced in all sorts of different ways. Perhaps the best definition of social media, though, is content that has been created cooperatively with its audience.

      Facebook, for example, is not a publishing company. It doesn't create any of its own content. It doesn't write articles or posts, and it doesn't upload films or images for people to view and enjoy.

      It allows its users to do all of that for their own amusement, edification, and profit. Facebook is a platform, a set of tools that enable this activity.

      It's as though the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) or Showtime were to fire all its actors, producers, news anchors, and scriptwriters; throw open its doors; and tell the world that all are welcome to come in, shoot their own programs, and broadcast them on the channel. Or as though People magazine were to open its pages up to anyone who wanted to publish a photograph or write some celebrity gossip. That would be sweet, wouldn't it?

      Of course, if that were to happen, you'd still have to tell people what channel you were on and when they could see your program. You'd still have to produce content that other people might actually enjoy and, inevitably, the people who took the most professional approach, put time and effort into what they were doing, and connected with their audiences would be the most successful.

      But even that wouldn't allow viewers to take part in the program, to participate in the creation of something bigger than a video segment or article in the next issue of the magazine. That participation is the cornerstone of social media.

      Create a group on a site such as Facebook, and you won't need to supply all of the text and all of the images to keep it lively and interesting. You'll be expecting other group members to add their stories and photographs, to engage in discussions, and to share their own experiences.

      Even bloggers, when they write a post, hope that their readers will join the discussion by leaving comments at the bottom of the post, taking the conversation in new directions and adding new information and perspectives.

      This is the social part of social media, and it means that publishing is now about participation.

      Let's say that again because it's so darn important to Twitter Power and to success on social media in any venue: publishing is now about participation.

      Someone who uses social media successfully doesn't just create content; he or she also creates conversations, and those conversations create communities.

      That's the real beauty of social media, and although creating a separate community may or may not be a primary goal – depending on the site – the result of social media can always be solid connections among participants.

      When those connections form around businesses, the results can be the sort of brand loyalty and commitment that sales professionals have been dreaming about since the first days of direct marketing.

      We'll admit it; our definition of social media is rather vague. At its broadest, it describes a form of publishing in which people swap rather than publish stories and the exchange of content happens within a community, rather like a chat in a restaurant.

      At its narrowest, it describes a tool set that lets publishers and marketers put their messages in front of thousands of people and encourage them to build strong connections and firm loyalty.

      However it's defined, social media has proved incredibly popular!

      As of September 2014, Facebook claims to have 864 million active daily members – that's active members, not just people who created a profile and never used it – and 703 million active daily mobile users. Expand the data to monthly active users, and there are more than 1.3 billion people busily posting and discussing things in the Facebook community. That's billion with a b.

      Twitter, which launched almost a decade ago – a lifetime in Internet terms – has similarly impressive statistics, and its growth has been phenomenal. As of this writing in late 2014, Twitter has 271 million active users, 78 percent of whom are on mobile devices. Together, we send more than 500 million tweets per day, and the system supports more than 35 languages.

      Helped by the appearance on the site of celebrities, such as Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, Rihanna, Ellen DeGeneres, Britney Spears, Ashton Kutcher, and Oprah Winfrey (who posted her first tweet live on her TV show, assisted by Twitter cofounder Evan Williams), Twitter's growth chart has changed from a gentle climb into a hockey stick, a phenomenal accomplishment.

      There is another fact about Twitter that's particularly interesting, though: It's massively underused.

      The average Twitterer has 126 followers and has sent out fewer than 300 tweets across the life of his or her account. Not only that, but 30 to 40 percent of Twitter accounts are also dormant, never having posted a single tweet.

      To put a few numbers here, Joel currently has 81,119 followers and follows 1,372 people, and Dave has 12,574 followers and follows 932 people. And to put things in perspective, when Joel was asked to write the first edition of Twitter Power back in 2009, he had only 5,000 followers, and not a single person had yet come close to having 1 million followers.

      Twitter's growth has turned it into a massive marketing opportunity.

      All of these figures just scratch the surface of the popularity of social media, though. YouTube attracts more than 1 billion unique visitors each month. Visitors watch more than 6 billion hours of video content each month. Oh, and 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Every minute!

      Throw in the countless millions of blogs and social networks, such as Pinterest, Instagram, Google Plus, and Reddit, and it becomes pretty clear that social media is a massive phenomenon that's changed the way all of us create and use content – and the way that businesses use that content and their distribution channels, too.

Social Media Really Is a Big Deal

      So we can see that social media sites and users can be big. Really, really big. But so what? There are lots of people in the telephone book, and that's very big, too. Being big doesn't make it a particularly