According to Nielsen Research, 60% of Twitter accounts get abandoned within a month. But Twitter, without doubt, holds the key for many a business as a major communication channel and for others as a major advertising medium. We all know about Dell computers 'tweeting' leading to a huge number of Twitter specific sales, and then there's BT Business who are actively using Twitter to police their brand 24/7 (and in fairness, doing a lot of good damage limitation and repair work).  Then of course, there's the ill-advised...the Habitat fiasco of last week whereby they used hash tags/trending topics to draw attention to their tweets about products at the expense of spamming the Twitter community. Offending tweets were soon removed and embarrassing public apologies posted in their place.

Ok, so we all know you should be, but who is actively twittering to promote their business? Hands up 'who doesn't get' twitter?  If we were the betting type, we'd wager that the most popular first tweet would be 'I still don't get Twitter', or something along those lines, and this would explain, why, according to Nielsen Research, 60% of Twitter accounts get abandoned within a month.

So what's to know?  Well, we'll spell it out...You know texting? We all do that from time to time, don't we?  Twitter uses a similar amount of characters in it's 'tweets' (short messages) - 140.  To give you an idea of what 140 characters buys you...we've just used 295 in this paragraph so far! So the trick is to communicate very succinctly.

Of course, you can't always say what you want or need to communicate in 140 characters, in which case, you have to feed the reader something to catch their interest and then link to an external article in full. And this of course, is where the marketing element comes in. Treat Twitter as a means of gaining 'followers' on your subject...your industry. Write regular interesting articles and either feed the start of those articles (like we have with this one) to Twitter using a tool like twitterfeed.com, and then have a link inside your 'tweet' to a fuller article, hosted on your own website. What better way to get relevent 'free' traffic into your website!  You can follow Hogtronix at Twitter by clicking here!