Twitter is a relatively new social media platform. A cross between a blog, instant message service and social network, Twitter lets you write mini blog posts no longer than 140 characters, and to interact with people in your network.

Initially, Twitter was dismissed as a useless fad. In my opinion, this happened because Twitter described itself as:

a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

After all, who cares if your plane is late or if you found traffic going to work, right?

However, in the last few months people and companies have discovered many ways to use Twitter a marketing and business tool.

Here are some ways you can use Twitter to support your marketing and branding efforts:

• Press releases: you can keep your audience up to date with your brand’s latest developments by posting links to your press releases.
• Time-sensitive special offers: you can use Twitter to promote items on sale, or special fares, like some airlines are already doing.
• Post event updates: if you go to a conference or trade show, you can tweet about the latest developments.
• News updates: Twitter can be a good medium to post news items of interest to your customers.
• Disaster Relief: Organizations such as the Red Cross are using twitter to post updates on their efforts to help during natural disasters and emergencies.
• Daily schedules: musicians, politicians and other traveling acts are using Twitter to post news about their appearances, schedules, etc.
• Links to interesting web pages: You can use Twitter as a social bookmarking service, like Delicious or Stumbleupon.
• New blog posts announcements: You can post a tweet every time you update your blog. True, you can also achieve this through RSS, but Twitter gives you yet another avenue to reach people that otherwise wouldn’t have had access to your RSS feed.
• Blog widget: you can install Twitter on your blog’s sidebar to show your latest tweets and give your blog a more interactive feel.
• Real estate listings: real estate agents can use Twitter to post links to new listings.
• Promotions: if you have a “deal of the day”, “daily lunch special” or any other recurring, time-sensitive promotion you can announce it in Twitter.
• Recruitment tool: many companies have filled positions with people they found through Twitter.
• Personal branding: by drafting a compelling personal profile, posting brief insights on topics related to your field, and by nurturing your network of followers, over time your Twitter account can turn into a strong personal branding signal.

Another beauty of Twitter is that’s it’s very easy to post. You can do so from Twitter’s website, by IM and even by sending text messages from your phone.

Find our what other people are blogging about Twitter.

Technorati Tags: marketing branding social+media twitter micro+blogging

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 2nd, 2007 at 1:16 pm and is filed under Branding, Marketing, Social Media. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.