by Irene Lizarraga

Created on: June 18, 2009

You've probably already heard of Twitter, the microblogging platform that started as a way for users to keep their network updated in small, bite size 140 characters messages (Tweets), but has now become the hottest media tool for business marketing. But why and how should you use it?

In the first place, Twitter is another way of getting your business presence in the web and as a side effect it shows that you're hot in the web 2.0 and social media aspects. It's also a great opportunity to engage your customers (or prospective ones) and keep in touch with what the Twitterverse is saying about your company or your business areas of interest. And setting up and account and using it is easy and straightforward (though it can be time consuming, more on that later).

Among other things, Twitter is great for informal opinion polls, knowing what people think about your company, releasing the latest news and promotions to a crowd of possible customers and is also an awesome tool for customer service. But to be useful for your business posting updates to Twitter is not enough, you need to get people to follow you (since only your followers will read your updates) and that is the tricky bit.

Below you'll find some simple guidelines that will help you become a citizen in the Twittersphere and have your message heard. Remember that for a user, stopping following somebody is just a click away, so you want to keep your followers happy and interested so they spread the word to others instead of just removing you from their feeds.

The most common misconception are thinking that Twitter is a sales pitch platform, a blog or just another place to expose your company RSS feed. Twitter is all about conversations, between human beings and not automatic news systems. Would you follow somebody whose only contribution to a conversation is a cold, out of the blue, sales pitch? This doesn't mean that you aren't supposed to send marketing messages on Twitter (that would defeat the purpose of it being a marketing tool) but those messages have to be tailored to a very specific purpose: Be useful to your users, relevant and engaging.

What does that mean? In general Twitter is a great place to announce promotions, events happening about/by your business, even other useful things that aren't really going to give your company more sales but will increase your credibility and help you get more followers. Once your tweets are in other people pages, their followers will know of them and if

• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next Page >>