The video below shows LinkedIn Co-founder Reid Hoffman and Twitter Co-founder Biz Stone and for a quick video tutorial on how to get set-up, check out the video at 1:43:

Visit our fan page at: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Canterbury-United-Kingdom/Realising-Designs-Website-Design/55475409819

If you are interesting in getting us on-board for your project then please get in touch to info@realisingdesigns.com. We can look to provide features such as your Twitter feed, images, blog posts, music, newsletter sign-up, contact forms and much much more via our custom written applications.

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

• 50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business (Chris Brogan) – http://budurl.com/fqet
• Web Strategy: The Evolution of Brands on Twitter – http://budurl.com/795p

With the popularity of Social sites and making long URL’s tiny, this site is sure to be of use.  As well as making the URL tiny, it also gives you a full control panel to track the number of clicks to each of your BudURL’s.  There is a free account available with a cap on links, premium account monthly charges ranging from $8 USD – $12 USD, suiting most users.  You can get your free account here: http://budurl.com

www.yoono.com

Which currently supports the following social sites:

The next interesting tool is another Firefox Add-on called Shareaholic, which enables you an easy way to share sites without cluttering your browser window to your various social pages, such as Digg, Delicious, Stumble Upon, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and many many more.  Interesting features too with their BuzzMonitor:

You can now find the freshest news, videos and blogs as they emerge on the realtime web within Shareaholic and easily share that on any of your social networks.

www.shareaholic.com

* PS. Just a little note to the curious that the plural of status in English is status… and in American English it’s statuses.

If you have a long link to send or post, why not check out TinyURL to make it short and manageable.  As an example, here is the Google local business listing for Realising Designs:

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=realising+designs+canterbury&sll=53.800651,-4.064941&sspn=16.157221,39.550781&ie=UTF8&ll=51.289017,1.084256&spn=0.016667,0.038624&t=h&z=15&iwloc=A&iwd=1&cid=12036402316830049164

And after being made Tiny and TinyURL:

http://tinyurl.com/cb6n6x

Visit the link: tinyurl.com/cb6n6x

I hope you find it useful to know and it can remove some of the annoyances of long links, such as being broken by word wrapping.