Twitter, Now Home Of The Micropitch

Twitter has been captivating internet users for months, only growing in popularity as a microblogging platform since its launch. Lately Twitter has seen an increase in use as a platform for marketers and businesses. To Twitter purists, this is an invasion of their space. To marketers, it is just another innovative and cheap form of advertisement. For a growing subset of business users and entrepreneurs, Twitter has become a way to submit encapsulated micropitches of their business: an elevator pitch in 140 characters or less.

Instead of having to arrange meetings with venture capitalists and angel investors, then make a short elevator pitch and hope they like your product, site or service, Twitter has given budding business owners a place to describe what they do in a few short sentences. This means that entrepreneurs will be forced to think their company plans through more thoroughly in order to encapsulate the core of their idea in such a short space. It also means less time wasted trying to get that coveted VC appointment.

The new term for this micropitch method is a TwitPitch, a concept invented by Stowe Boyd. The idea is taking the twittersphere by storm, with TwitPitches flying on the public timeline. Sarah Perez of Read Write Web is one of many proponents of the idea, and has begun to encourage TwitPitchers to use the #twitpitch hashtag for easier twitpitch tracking. Once a tweet has been tagged with #twitpitch, users can just go to the TwitPitch hashtag page to see the tweet progress.

At first I was skeptical. There has been a recent rash of internet marketing books telling people how to game Twitter for nefarious SEO purposes, resulting in mass amounts of users having to spend far too much time blocking these invasive parasites of the internet. I assumed this was just another facet of the recent rash of Twitter spam. In fact, the TwitPitch is a useful, quick and to the point marketing development on Twitter that has potential.

One of the biggest issues with many start ups is a lack of focus and direction. By not having a clear idea of what your company does and where it is going, you run the risk of failure. One way to give your budding start up laser focus is to be forced to hone your pitch to a fine scalpel edge. In order to make an effective pitch in that short space, you have to know precisely what your start up plans to do, when and how. You must then convey it clearly to other people. If you can do that, you have a fighting chance at success.

If you want to make your own TwitPitch, you can. It does not have to be directed at Stowe Boyd, though if you want to TwitPitch him you can find his TwitPitch rules here. You can send out a global TwitPitch to the entire public timeline, increasing your chances of being seen. In fact, public TwitPitches are recommended over direct messages. In an Internet based economy where the right kind of social exposure can make or break you, the TwitPitch is the next logical evolutionary step.