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Twitter is just a miniaturized blog. But the simplicity of it sometimes hides the vast potential of Twitter as a tool for business. The “social” networking power of  Twitter enables a message to be transmitted far and fast, relying on little besides instant digital word-of-mouth. When applied to promotion or advertising, Twitter can become an effective marketing channel. The networking power enables you to connect with customers, suppliers, associates, and colleagues, building a genial and conversational relationship through your tweets. You can pass along valuable messages, solicit instant feedback on questions or ideas, or even just share some tidbits about life at the office to put a human face on your business.

What is a Micro-Blog?

The “micro” part of micro-blogging comes from the fact that each tweet—the messages that Twitter users send—must be no longer than 140 characters (including spaces). This feature—some call it a constraint, others say it’s the best part of Twitter—forces you to compress whatever it is you have to say into only a few words. As an example:

+Beginning after the first plus sign and ending before the second plus sign, this sentence serves to show you exactly how long tweets can be.+

Between those plus signs are exactly 140 characters of content. That’s the longest tweet you’ll ever see. In order to accommodate these parameters, the abbreviations and jargon that most people associate with instant messaging and SMS (i.e. text messaging) have found their way to Twitter:

Its not odd 4 u 2 c thngs writn like this since lots of ppl can stil undrstnd u w/o seein it all spelled out.

Tweets Can Be Professional

Writing in SMS style, though occasionally important in order to fully communicate your message, has it drawbacks: it lacks professionalism, and some users might balk at the seeming incomprehensibility of it. The truth is, most of the people on Twitter are not tech nerds or impatient 12-year-olds who lack basic grammar and spelling skills. Many are older, educated, and just discovering social networking, so catering to their sensibilities is important.

Making it Fit

Another obvious way to fit into the 140-character limit is to eliminate non-essential words like articles, prepositions, and other content-poor words that we use in everyday conversation. If you wanted to tweet about the Copenhagen climate summit happening this month, you could write with proper grammar: “Obama is going to the climate change summit in order to seal the deal on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.” That’s 107 characters. Or, you can communicate the same point with only 62 characters: “Obama going to climate summit to seal deal on Kyoto successor.” Writing in this truncated “headline” style may feel strange at first, but it also enables some of the other features that make Twitter one of the most important websites currently in operation.

@Replies

Replying to a tweet enables you to comment on others’ tweets and hold an open conversation between your networks of followers, depending on each person’s settings in that regard. To reply to someone you merely begin your tweet with “@” followed by their username, and then fill in your content. This conversation style is great for businesses looking to talk directly to customers, partners or prospects.

Retweeting is Currency

Retweeting is a way to spread something you saw in someone else’s tweets while giving credit where credit is due. Depending on the character length of the original tweet, it must be shortened to accommodate “RT @username.” “RT” stands for “retweet,” which is just an indicator to your followers that you’re passing something along. (Important Note -We coach our clients to make it easy for others to retweet their messages by  leaving 20-30 characters for this citation.  Retweeting is the currency of Twitter because your message is broadcast  beyond your own direct followers.  Check out How to Retweet: A Simple Guide.) 

Link Shortening Services

The first time you want to pass on a link, like a news article or something business related, you may notice that the link is too long to fit into a 140-character tweet. This fact has not been lost on Twitter users. A bunch of secondary services have sprung up that will generate mini URLs that fit into your tweet and leave as much room as possible for your comment or message. Among the most popular are bit.ly; TinyURL; and Cligs. They all work on the same principle, though bit.ly and Cligs can also provide analytics about your links, giving you valuable information about how many clicks the link has received.

To use these services, follow the above links to their websites. On bit.ly and TinyURL you can immediately put your long URL into the box and have it shortened. Then, copy the short URL into your tweet. On Cligs you have to navigate to the “Create New Clig” tab, but once there the process is the same: insert the long URL, shorten it, and post the short URL into your tweet.

(Important Note – Sometimes URL shortening like this is used to hide the URL of a malicious website, exposing you to security issues if you click on something corrupt. So always make sure you trust the user who sent you a link before you click on it.)

Photo in this post is by Jeff Turner (respres)