Twitter is a micro-blogging platform for messages of less than 140 characters.  Short sharp tweets, delivered across a number of platforms to followers (of your brand, not knights of the realm).  It is partly down to this assimilation across mobile platforms (the only social network to truly grasp this, due to its simplicity, as even Facebook stumbles when it comes to images and video) that Twitter is so successful.  The other reason is its use of vertical connects.  You follow on Twitter based on interests and expertise, as social as it is, it’s about information dissemination and VERY niche targeting, which makes it unrivalled in its power to connect brands and the individuals who want to meet them.

Use it to:

Develop your personal branding; direct traffic to sites, blogs, podcasts, videos, images, comment, forums – WHEREVER the party is; or crucially to administer unparalleled customer support and prospecting.  Organisation happens via #tags, which collate tweets around a certain topic, creating pockets of relevance and applications such as Twitterhawk allow for the searching and automated tweeting of hot, not vaguely warm, but HOT leads in your exact target vicinity.  Your searches can include key terms, exclude key terms, be weighted for positive or negative attributes, filter for location and include up to 5 different responses for different types of identified tweet.  Very clever.

What you could get:

Real business.  Whereas conversion has historically been hard to prove, with almost no concrete stats emerging from any social (or anti-social) media for that matter, Twitter can deliver hot leads that just require tipping over the edge into a pot labeled ‘revenue increasing’.

Information, faster than any other method as networks catch fire with big (and small) world and niche news.