Following on from last week’s article about LinkedIn, here are some thoughts on Twitter. Again, complete ignorance is assumed, but even if you think you know about Twitter, it’s worth reading, as most businessess don’t really use it effectively.

Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s Twitter profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers who are known as followers. Tweets can be compared with the status updates that users make in social media networks such as LinkedIn or Facebook.

Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access. This means that all tweets are in the public domain and can be searched. Senders can also send messages directly to an individual user, or forward received messages to their own network (known as retweeting).

To group posts together by topic or type, users make use of hashtags, which are words or phrases prefixed with the # symbol. Similarly, the letter d followed by a Twitter username allows users to send messages privately to their followers. Otherwise, the @ symbol followed by a username publicly states that the attached tweets are a reply to (or just mention) any specific users (who can find such recent tweets logged in their interface). The ‘Twitter Lists’ feature makes it possible for users to follow (and mention/reply to) lists of authors instead of following individual authors.

Twitter is free and all users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, external applications (notably including those developed for smart phones), or SMS, although the availability of SMS services varies by country. The service currently has more than 100 million users worldwide.

The use of Twitter’s API for sending and receiving text messages by other applications often eclipses direct use of Twitter. Notable examples include software/services such as TweetDeck and HootSuite, which enable users to send and receive messages from Twitter and other social networking services within the same user interface.

Twitter has also spawned an ecosystem of other services that compensate for its limitations. Services such as bit.ly and tr.im shorten URLs to fit within the 140 character limit, services such as TwitPic enable the hosting of images and services such as What the Trend provide analysis.

The service’s nature makes it a very flexible tool, though one that is hard to define. Although it is primarily used by individuals to post their thoughts and forward content, it also has business uses, for example to alert followers to new content (estate agents use it to alert clients to new properties, Dell uses it to alert followers to special offers), whilst some companies proactively search for mentions of their name to identify problems or dissatisfied customers.

So how should Twitter best be used? In most cases your company should:

• Create a profile and customise it

Pick a username that includes your company name. Add a good quality icon , biography and a link to your company website. You can also customise your profile page by creating a custom background image. This offers some interesting possibilities, as you can customise the background  so it includes your logo, reflects your brand and contains links to your company. If you do business in more than one language and/or country, you should have a separate Twitter profile for each and keep content in that language only.

• Use a tool such as HootSuite to manage your social networking activity

Tools such as HootSuite enable you to manage social networking activity from one convenient interface, including sending and reading messages, and will make your social media activity much more efficient. Although prices and features vary, a free service is usually sufficient. Most will also let you set-up searches, so you can monitor posts for mentions of your company and particular keywords. If you get a lot of tweets sent direct to you, or you want a number of employees to be able to collaborate, consider using CoTweet, a business-orientated tool for managing your company’s Twitter activity.

• Integrate Twitter into your existing monitoring activity and learn about your followers

Use Twitter to follow industry commentators, competitors, vendors, client contacts and anyone else that may give you opportunities or good ideas. You should also try to keep track of any key industry figures that follow you, as you may want to tailor posts to their interests.

• Tweet and retweet interesting snippets

Use Twitter to send messages to your followers. What to write will depend on your objectives, but good subjects are business wins, new website content, personnel changes, special offers and links to other content that followers may find useful. Frequency can be anything from weekly to several times a day, with quality and variety of posts more important than quantity.

• Ask questions and converse

Keep track of who your followers are and ask questions that will prompt responses. For example, is a potential new feature of interest? Is a new piece of legislation a concern?

• Promote and integrate with other media

Make sure that potential followers are aware of your Twitter presence by linking from your website, other social media pages and in printed material. There are lots of simple pieces of code that will let you display your tweets on your website, but don’t be tempted to echo your tweets as LinkedIn or Facebook status updates, you should tailor them to what you are doing on those networks.

• Help your employees use Twitter

If you’ve got employees who frequently use Twitter, help them benefit the company by providing them with suggestions of material that they might like to include in their tweets. This can be particularly important in the run-up to events such as trade shows and product launches. You should also ensure employees know who to contact with sales leads, technical support issues or other intelligence that they might encounter whilst online.

• Tweet at regular intervals and don’t fixate on the number of followers that you have

Most businesses tweet to keep their clients aware of them and what they are doing. If you’re going to do that, you need to be a regular and noticed presence, but not so much that you are a nuisance. The best way to do this is to make your tweets regular and at the times of day your audience will be likely to see your tweets amongst the others in their feeds. In a B2B context, mid-morning or just before lunch can be ideal, in a consumer context, late afternoon might be better. Also, don’t treat the number of followers as a goal. Five good clients who read your tweets and respond are likely to be far more valuable than fifty that ignore your posts.