Twitter's Corporate Users Get A New Marketing Tool - Tech Weblogs

A neat new tool for companies that are looking to use Twitter for marketing: Twittertise, which lets you schedule Twitter messages in advance to send automatically.

What's the point? Twitter is a live wire, so whatever you send now is immediate. That works for individual users, or companies trying to take part in real-time conversations. But if a company wants to send out pre-written tweets -- like promotional messages, coupon links, reminders, etc. -- over the span of a day or a week, they'd need someone to remember to manually send out the messages. (Or some sort of home-brewed scheduling system.)

Enter Twittertise: A simple Web site that you can log into with your Twitter username and password, type in tweets -- 140 characters, max -- and schedule them to send at a specific time. Want to send people to a Web page? Twittertise routes links through a URL shortening tool called Bit.ly, which lets you track how many people have clicked through your link.

Founder Jon Steinberg says a couple hundred people a day are already using the service, including Comcast (CMCSA), which used Twittertise during hurricane Gustav to send out storm preparedness notes.

The service is free; Steinberg, who's a manager at Google (GOOG) in New York, says he's running it as a hobby. "I saw a need and the url wasn't taken, so I bought it a few months ago," he tells us. "I am intrigued by the idea of pulling APIs together to fill a need, and that's what I was trying to do with Twitter and bit.ly." Steinberg hired a Canadian developer to build the service, and voila.

twittertise-comcast.gif: Paste this image in your site, Myspace, Facebook, Ebay copy this code...

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