Twitter is a social networking platform that individuals and companies use for various purposes. Some use it to share hot takes, vent, snoop, or complain to customer support about the unsatisfactory experience of particular products or services.
The platform is quite popular, with over 396.5 million users spread across the globe. People post memes, raging rows, personal stories, experiences with a particular brand, or share their thoughts.
In this article, we’ll learn about the history and the presence of this incredibly popular microblogging site, Twitter.
History of Twitter
The platform was conceptualized and created by Jack Dorsey, a co-founder of Twitter, in the year 2006. Evan Williams, Noah Glass, and Biz Stone, apart from Jack Dorsey, co-founded the powerful social networking platform. The initial idea was simple and reasonably straightforward, to create an SMS-based communication platform, allowing friends to keep tabs on one another by updating statuses. The idea was similar to texting.
In 2007, Twitter leveraged the potential of a Southwest Interactive Conference, during which over 60,000 tweets were sent. The platform started gaining exponential popularity from then.
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Twitter shared the same concept as SMS-based communications, so it had to follow a 140-character limit initially imposed by the network carriers and not Twitter itself. After that, as Twitter started gaining popularity and grew to become a web platform, they still chose to keep the character limit for each tweet as it aligned with the brand ideology. The popularity and user base of Twitter have increased exponentially since its conceptualization.
Who Owns Twitter?
Twitter is basically a public company. The shares of Twitter are traded on the NYSE stock exchange. Over 80% of the total shares are owned by institutions, including investment funds and private companies. The primary institutional owners of Twitter include Morgan Stanley’s Investment Arm called Morgan Stanley Investment Management, Inc., and Vanguard Group. Recently, the platform accepted an offer from one of the most incredible Entrepreneurs, Elon Musk, of $40 billion (£33,532,000,000).
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Former CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, took it to Twitter and thanked both Musk and Parag Agrawal, the current CEO of the social networking giant. Before Musk took charge, the SpaceX owner expressed his interest in transforming the company from public to private. But, Musk has now pulled the plugs.
What is Twitter Used For?
Twitter is a social media platform that allows like-minded people to connect and share their thoughts. The platform also allows its users to discover stories related to the latest news, trends, and events happening across the globe. In addition, marketers and PR teams can use Twitter to enhance their brand awareness and help their target audience.
How Does Twitter Work?
Twitter is a micro-blogging site allowing you to post status of 140 characters or less. These statuses are called tweets and can be seen by anyone depending on your privacy settings. You have the freedom to link to other articles and or videos within your tweets. You can also see what your followers are posting and engaging too. People use it for different purposes; while some use it to interact with brands and endorse their offerings, some use it merely for entertainment by following celebrities and following the latest meme trends or hashtags to reciprocate humor.
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