German Startups and Twitter

Twitter has reshaped the way how information is flowing. Nanosized infobits enter the system, since there are basically no costs for producing them there are vast amounts of them. The networks of followers and followees make an ecosystem for announcing, amplifying, filtering out the news value in real time within Twitter, but the information gets transferred to other mediums as well, of course, which makes Twitter a hyperefficient way to allocate attention.

This weekend I wanted to take a look at how German startups use Twitter (for announcements, for communicating with users, for gossip, …) and analyse how many followers they have, what impact it has on their communications strategy and so on – and it was quite a surprise to find out that hardly any German company uses Twitter at all. I may have missed a few, but it actually took me quite a while and URL-guesswork to spot 18 companies out of about 500 which should be aware of Twitter by now and which definitively would profit from setting up and maintaining a Twitter account.

And many of those who do use Twitter make some pretty obvious technical mistakes like dead accounts, not following their followers, not proactively following influencers or off topic noise. Only a few companies seem to get the marketing and attention potential of Twitter and have a community manager assigned for dropping news every once in a while, responding to feedback and questions and maybe joining a discussion or two.

This is odd, because Twitter is popular in Germany. Many events like Barcamps use Twitter as their preferred medium for announcements and there is a beta hungry crowd of at least 200 people who will sign up to anything if a site gets discussed on Twitter.

Anyway, here is the list of the companies using Twitter we are aware of. The (number) indicates the current number of followers. Let us know if we forgot anyone and feel invited to join me on Twitter.

	Qype (156)
	Brabblr (130)
	sevenload (116)
	cellity (109)
	Wevent (96)
	Hitflip (92)
	Mister Wong.de (68)
	A better tomorrow (58)
	MindMeister (50)
	Yieeha (46)
	mixxt (40)
	Hypediss (38)
	futtrn (27)
	Mambler (27)
	“yigg”:hhttp://www.yigg.de/ (17)
	triQQr (14)
	yuntoo (6)
	plazes (1)