The Netpreneur Blog

You’ve no doubt heard of Twitter!

For the benefit of any newbies, Twitter.com has been around for a couple of years now and is a micro-blogging tool.  It allows you to post short answers of no more than 140 characters to the question “What are you doing?”.  The idea is that you “follow” those who you want to keep in touch with and they in turn “follow” you so you end up with a followers/or friends list of people who can see your regular posts or tweets.

But what the heck for?  You might ask ….

Well it is true that many people use it purely for personal purposes so their tweets may be something like “walking the dog” or “time for lunch” so many see twitter as a trivial waste of time.

So are there business uses for Twitter?

Yes, when used with a business goal in mind, twitter can help you build your network and reputation and promote your business.

Here are some examples:

774 ABC Melbourne radio use twitter mainly to give traffic updates which is great for commuters accessing twitter on their mobile phones.  They also give updates of news headlines and upcoming programs.  See: http://twitter.com/774melbourne

AMC Australasia use twitter to post job vacancies. See: http://twitter.com/amctopjobs

If you want to build your reputation in a particular topic area you could micro-blog about the topic in the same way you would on a blog but much shorter posts!  You can also “retweet” which is pass other people’s relevant posts on to your followers.

Some Australian business tweeters :

Cascade Brewery – http://twitter.com/cascadebrewery
Tourism Queensland – http://twitter.com/Queensland
ABC TV – http://twitter.com/ABCTV_australia
SmartCompany – http://twitter.com/SmartCompany
KevinRuddPM – http://twitter.com/KevinRuddPM
Imax Melbourne – http://twitter.com/imaxmelbourne
STA Travel – http://twitter.com/statravelAU
JetStar – http://twitter.com/JetstarAirways
EMI Music – http://twitter.com/EMIMusicAU
Netregistry – https://twitter.com/Netregistry
iiNet – http://twitter.com/iiNet
Penguin Books – http://twitter.com/PenguinBooksAus
Dick Smiths – http://twitter.com/DickSmith
Digital Photography School – http://twitter.com/digitalps
Media Hunter – http://twitter.com/mediahunter
Organic Babe – http://twitter.com/organicbabe

Here are a couple of recent related articles if you’d like to do further reading:

Join the Twitterati, Sydney Morning Herald
Australian brands using Twitter listed by industry, Fanbloddytastic
Twittering chefs, Sydney Morning Herald
Australia’s Top 100 Influential Twitterers, Social Networking News Daily

I only jumped on the twitter band wagon very recently, see: http://twitter.com/melissanorfolk

Are you tweeting? See you in twitterville!

Tags: twitter

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 13th, 2009 at 9:42 pm and is filed under Melissa Norfolk Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.