I have been asked many times about the usefulness of Twitter in business. The answer really lies in your customer base. It is important to be where your customers are and if your customers are using social media websites then that is where you should be as well. Social Media is not a kid’s game and more and more people are joining social communities like Twitter, Myspace, Facebook, and LinkedIn. It is important to know your customer and build relationships with them. Having a presence on Twitter should not be about advertising it should be about connecting with your customers and learning from them. Twitter is useful for a variety of reasons it can aid in customer service, marketing, News updates, and driving traffic to your websites.

As I stated Twitter is not a forum to sale products. Marketing yourself or your business is a little different in this space. You can still create brand identity and develop new customers and business partners, but it must be done in a new way. You cannot simply try to sell people on your product you must offer cool and useful information to the community in order to develop a following. The self-serving business will not find twitter useful you have to be useful to others in this space and offer something to the community. If you do not offer value to the community you are not much better than a spammer. If you offer advice, tips, or instant updates on the status of your business people will start to follow your company and you will have a successful social media campaign.

Here are some ways a Twitter post can aid in your business:

• Customer Service: Easy questions can be answered using this forum
• Branding and Relationships: Keeping people updated (sale announcements, customer feedback, nforming people of emergencies)
• Direct sales: “30% off using product code XYZ”
• Consumer Products: Announcing the launched a new product
• Retail Information: You can get consumer feedback and learn what is working.

As we have seen, more and more people are joining spaces like Twitter. As social media continues to become more mainstream, it will be important for companies to view this as another channel to communicate with their Customers. But remember, you get as much out of social media as you put in, be useful, provide value, and always be rethinking how you want to interact with customers.