Twitter first saw the light of day in March 2006 when the social networking platform was created by Jack Dorsey. He launched it to the world four months later to an enthusiastic audience who soon got the hang of saying a lot in just 140 characters. Initially Twitter was used by people who spent their time wondering what to tweet about, the term commonly used for making a microblogging post on Twitter. Before long, however, ideas on using twitter in more profitable ways, how to use twitter for business in fact, were beginning to sprout. Today it seems like everyone is using twitter for business, and very successfully too in many cases.

An incredible 200 million tweets on average are made every day, and Twitter search is responsible for 1.6 billion searches every day too. That represents a very powerful degree of social interaction. No wonder then that among the millions of Twitter users a lot of business is conducted on a daily scale. Even though this is so, however, a lot of businesses are using Twitter wrong. They see the microblogging platform as a classified ads site and they push their products or services relentlessly. This goes against all the rules of social media marketing and of course it doesn’t work.

Using twitter for business successfully requires a much more subtle approach. However, you can find thousands of companies who churn out tweets on a daily basis that announce corporate accomplishments, who got promoted or demoted, links to company press releases and new product information and the like. There doesn’t seem to be much if any analysis of how a tweet about anything to do with the company approach is working. Thousands upon thousands of such examples exist where businesses are using twitter wrong, thinking all they have to do is mention their business on Twitter constantly in order to find eventual success.

On the other hand, there are plenty of businesses that know exactly how to use twitter for business successfully. They have adopted a strategy that is more interested in the long term relationship than the short term sale. They build a rapport between themselves and their customers and potential customers, as well as their employees, to create a personal atmosphere of trust. This also helps to build a company brand that becomes easy to recognize instantly. There is no hard selling or even mention of selling. Everything is about the relationship between the company and those who express an interest in the company and what it does.

The result of knowing how to use twitter properly for social media marketing is increased traffic to the company web site as more and more people happily spread the word, which in turn helps to drive sales. A Twitter account can be a very powerful tool. Those 140 characters actually work better than they would if twitter users were allowed unlimited twittering. They force people to be concise and exact in a very similar way that a good classified ad does, and this gets the message across much better. When businesses and people start using twitter as a social networking platform where ideas are freely exchanged, amazing things can happen.

One of the more interesting ideas on using twitter is as a way to discover what people are saying and thinking about the products or services of a company. This is very easy to do through Twitter search. In a way this can be seen as passive research where the things people say can be taken on board and used to improve a product or service. If, for example, enough people complain about a certain aspect of a product on Twitter, and if the company is monitoring what is being said, they have at their fingertips a very cheap, very simple and highly effective way of knowing exactly what to do to rectify the situation, as well as their business profits.

One of the secrets of a good strategy on how to use twitter for business is to follow the right people. Ideally, a business should aim to have the right followers, but that isn’t always easy in the beginning. Following the right people can be one of the best ways to get followers, as repeated contact and interaction can eventually get the right attention, resulting in the desired benefit of a healthy community of followers who like to engage in the conversation, information and interesting interaction. Positioning a business in front of high profile people, tweeters who have clout and who demand attention, can do wonders almost overnight. Social relationships of this nature may start as a stream, but can soon become a fast flowing river.

One of the objections to using twitter for business is that it takes up too much time. It’s certainly true that tweeting and reading what everyone else has tweeted is time consuming, and it’s understandable how a business owner might not see any value in such seemingly frivolous activity. However, this can largely be overcome by using some of the auxiliary services that have grown to assist the Twitter community. One of the most useful is TweetLater. This is a service that allows users to schedule their tweets in much the same way as emails in an autoresponder. There is some work involved in the initial setup, but once that is done it becomes a hands-free operation.

Twitter can be used as an effective research tool in business once a company has built up a healthy following. As with everything else, a survey should be gently introduced and positioned as a way to help those following to gain a better experience with a product or service. A business should always try to think like a customer and address the benefits that a customer will receive. Once the customer feels their needs are being catered for, they will be much more receptive to taking a survey, for example. They will see it as part of the overall relationship of give and take. Any company that understands how to achieve that level of cooperation is one that knows how to use Twitter for business.