In our business, everybody’s got a niche. If porn customers want a site that gives them big-busted disabled Jewish lesbians, they’ll get it. (Did I just give you an idea? I want in for 10 percent, buddy!) The same goes for every normal, abnormal and subnormal fetish out there.
It turns out that the people who make Twitter have the same idea. Whoever you are and whatever you do on your Twitter feed, someone is out there trying to meet your needs.
Let’s say, for example, you want people to know where you are. Maybe you’re a porn star who wants to meet her fans at a trade show. Or you just want to find out where your friends vanished to during a pub crawl.
Sure, you can Twitter your location to all your fans, but what if you move a few booths away five minutes from now? As for your drunken friends, you can try to reach them on your cell, but they’re probably too blitzed to hear their phones ring.
Twitter is coming to the rescue. It’s introducing GPS-enabled tweets that will automatically tell your followers—the people who track your Twitter feed—where you are by latitude and longitude.
You can tell Twitter where you are now, but the system is a bit clunky. That will change, perhaps by the time you read this. Under the new system, you’ll simply turn a default “off”’ setting to “on” and your tweets will tell everyone your exact location.
This will do more than just tell people how to find you. At a trade show or a special porn-star event, you could set your cell phone to monitor the tweets of everybody in the building. It’s a great way to keep in touch with current—and potential—customers.
If you’re worried about privacy, that’s definitely something to be concerned about. Use this feature with caution if stalkers are part of your life.
(By the way, Pink Visual has found a unique use for GPS: It’s created a mobile app that allows people to pinpoint where they’ve had sex. This might be a challenge for those in the mile-high club, but I’m sure they’ll do their best to figure out a way to figure it out: Were we over Omaha or Kansas City when you blew me in the lavatory?)
There’s more new stuff for the hundreds of porn-industry big shots on Twitter. Let’s say, for example, you want to know whenever anybody tweets about you, your company or your product.
You could set up a search on the Twitter site or your Twitter reader program, but that’s a hassle. Instead, just go to TweetAlarm.com, where you can set up email “alarms” to alert you whenever someone tweets about something you’re interested in.
Think of it as the Twitter version of “Google alerts.” (Google alerts, by the way, are alerts you can set up to let you know when certain words appear in news stories or blog posts. That’s also a handy way to track what people are saying about you.)
We’ve got even more Twitter tips. Sometimes you want to send a tweet out at a certain time, maybe to catch people when they get home and are ready to spend some one-handed quality time with their computer and favorite porn site. Or maybe you want to reach your followers with details about your new video at a time when they might be free to watch it. Say 10 p.m. on a Friday night.
But you might not be near a computer yourself at that exact time. No problem! Just drop by FutureTweets.com, which allows you to schedule tweets at specific times, even months into the future.
Speaking of Fridays, that’s the day when Twitterers tell others about their favorite people to follow. It’s called “Follow Friday.”
There’s a better way. If you have a list of people you’d like to suggest that your followers follow—maybe your affiliates or porn stars you work with—go to Lunch.com and make a list of your favorite feeds. Then your followers can go there and easily follow them.
The idea of lists is so enticing that Twitter is experimenting with it directly and may have it in place for all users by the time you read this. It may be possible for you to click on someone else’s list—say of “Top Blonde Porn Stars to Follow”—and automatically follow all the feeds listed.
Be creative about this. What kind of lists can you create? If they’re unique and fun—“10 Top Shaved Porn Stars,” “5 Porn Stars Named Jennifer” or “12 Biggest Dicks in Porn”—you’ll give your own followers something to enjoy and tell their friends about.
Twitter can be a massive time-suck, but it’s also a great way to reach out to customers and fans. Just remember that a little bit of imagination will go a long way.
This article originally ran in the November issue of AVN.
