Last week we said that Social Media is a great way to help businesses grow by helping them get new customers, increase brand awareness, and stay connected with both customers and competitors alike.This week we'll start our discussion of each specific social media site and what each can do for your business.

Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service that allows users to answer the question, "What are you doing?" by sending short text messages, or “tweets,” of 140 characters or less. People “follow” each other and are thereby exposed to one another’s tweets.

As of September 14, 2010, Twitter has 175 million registered users writing 95 million tweets per day.  Folks in nearly every part of the world are using Twitter. Currently, Twitter employs 300 people and they’re hiring right now!

Clearly, Twitter isn’t just a fad, people.  It isn’t going anywhere, and it’s only going to grow stronger, so you’ve got to get in there and start tweeting it up!

Here’s how!

You need goals for Twitter.  Goals are good.

While Twitter can be a great tool, without a clearly defined goal for how you’re going to use it and what you want to get out of it, using Twitter is just typing words on the Internet.  You need more than that if this bird is gonna fly  (Get it?  Twitter? Bird? FLY? We’re so clever!) , so before you even create an account, sit down and map out your plan.  It can be revised at any time once you’ve gotten the hang of it and learned about all the neat things you can do with your tweets.

For example, Twitter can be a great tool to use when running give-aways and contests. You can set rules based on tweets where each of your Twitter followers who re-tweets your contest announcement gets an entry into the contest.  For every contest entry, that user’s followers are exposed to your contest.  It goes on and on until the whole twittersphere is abuzz with tweets about your business!  As more people re-tweet, thousands of potential consumers will have seen and participated in your promotion. Plus, it’s a great way to build a larger Twitter following!  How awesome is that?

 But that’s not all!

There’s more!

Here’s a quick list of other stuff Twitter can help you accomplish:

• You can tweet from conferences and events to let your followers know where you are, what you’re learning, and what you’re doing to improve your business. 
• News flies around the twittersphere very quickly!  You can capitalize on this in a multitude of ways.
• Twitter can help you learn more about your customers and your competitors.  By following people on Twitter, you can get to know them better and understand what they like and what interests them.  You can also get a handle on what competitors are up to.
• Tweets can provide you with instant feedback from customers—not all of it will be good, but you can learn from it and make improvements.  You can also use Twitter as a way to “listen” to what people are talking about.  Twitter has search tools that allow you to keep track of what’s being said around the Twittersphere.
• You can post about your accomplishments and distribute links that take your followers back to your web pages, press releases, and other promotional sites. You just have to make sure you add a personal touch and not seem self-serving or self-promotional.  That can turn folks off in a big hurry.

This is in no way an exhaustive lists of the possibilities Twitter can open up for your business, but it’s food for thought.  As more and more business are jumping into the Twittersphere, it’s important for you to join them, but you have to do so wisely or Twitter can hurt your business just as much as it can help it.  However, with a little creativity and a solid set of goals, you can set the Twittersphere on FIRE!

Happy tweeting!