Twitter is everywhere and so are paid courses to tell you what to do with this new marketing tool, for which the possibilities are limitless. If case you don’t know what Twitter is, here is a short summary:

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets, which are limited to 140 characters. Users can use hashtags (a word prefixed with #) to specify a link to a search for that term.

Is Twitter right for you? To help get you thinking about your business, here are some short ideas to get you thinking:

1. What do people say about your company?

   A great place to start is to search around and see if you or your company appear and most importantly, what they say about you. Are your staff active Twitter users, do they write about their work experiences?  Are they disclosing information before they should?

2. Research your market

   Are your competitors already on Twitter and what are they doing and saying? You may also want to run some searches for terms relating to your industry to see what people are tweeting about. You can run searches on your Twitter homepage in the right-hand sidebar or from http://search.twitter.com/

3. Do you offer support for a product, application or service?

   Whether you sell widgets or services your customer care is likely to be paramount to your business. Twitter can be a great way to catch people in real time as they have problems, offering you the opportunity to offer support, resolve the problem and retain a customer. This is shown by the following Twitter exchange about a free Firefox add-on named Yoono:

   jmmonty Any suggestions to keep up to date – #tweetdeck, #monitter? Added Twitter saved searches and #yoono has given up
   yoonosupport @jmmonty We haven’t given up at all. In fact, we’re going to do incredible things over the next few releases. I can answer any questions
   jmmonty @yoonosupport Thanks, its my firefox add-on – can you switch off just the Twitter search? The updates and replies work perfectly
   yoonosupport @jmmonty Well you can delete the saved searches in Yoono but not a way to disable the feature entirely
   jmmonty @yoonosupport Your a star, thanks that worked perfectly… thanks for a great add-on (& support) #yoono

   The upshot, I am still using Yoono and am a happy customer.

4. Pro-active sales and being an on-line expert

   As well as complaints, you can be pro-active and make an introduction in real time, something being used heavily by Las Vegas casinos to begin the sales process (read a nice article in the Las Vegas Sun).

   Imagine you search for “Any one know a good …?” and that happens to be a perfect potential client for you, then you have the option to initiate contact. You can also be more “slowly slowly catchy monkey” and look to answer people’s questions in your field of expertise. Your helpful nature may assist you in making pitches that feel more genuine and less of a hard sale.

Clear benefits to business do seem to be emerging as the technology spreads like wild fire, but the one factor things come down to is time. The big question, is your time best spent on Twitter or using other marketing channels?

You can follow James at Realising Designs at: http://twitter.com/jmmonty