Twitter Use 2

Twitter can be used simply to alert people of changes to new content that has been posted somewhere, in an old-media, broadcast-based model.

CBS Radio News provides an interesting example of this.  This approach does not really take advantage of the interactivity of a medium like Twitter, but it does get your message out to a large number of people (5,780 right now, in CBS Radio News' case) quickly.  Of course, an organization with a small or medium sized staff probably does not have enough manpower to have someone sitting on every social media site, interacting with users all day.  CBS Radio News' twitter presence is somewhat odd, because instead of pushing people towards a web site, it pushes people towards an hourly radio newscast, while also providing a single headline per hour (on the weekends at least, there may be more during the week).

This example is also interesting because of the way it meshes the round-the-clock, short-burst needs of radio, with that of social media.  The messages being sent on Twitter today have been written for years, perhaps for decades, and sent to radio stations that air the CBS Radio newscasts on the hour.  They are used by the stations, to have some idea of what programming is coming up, so they can plan their own programming.  Some of the local stations read the messages on-air, to promote the network newscast.