Twitter for Business
November 10, 2011 By Dave Koehler

Twitter.com has a special section dedicated to helping businesses get the most out of Twitter. If you have a bit of time, using Twitter can be a good way to interact in a positive way with existing and potential customers.

If you're not familiar with Twitter, start with their definition, and glossary. Once you've got the basics down, review this great list of best practices:

1. Share. Share photos and behind the scenes info about your business. Even better, give a glimpse of developing projects and events. Users come to Twitter to get and share the latest, so give it to them!
2. Listen. Regularly monitor the comments about your company, brand, and products.
3. Ask. Ask questions of your followers to glean valuable insights and show that you are listening.
4. Respond. Respond to compliments and feedback in real time
5. Reward. Tweet updates about special offers, discounts and time-sensitive deals.
6. Demonstrate wider leadership and know-how. Reference articles and links about the bigger picture as it relates to your business.
7. Champion your stakeholders. Retweet and reply publicly to great tweets posted by your followers and customers.
8. Establish the right voice. Twitter users tend to prefer a direct, genuine, and of course, a likable tone from your business, but think about your voice as you Tweet. How do you want your business to appear to the Twitter community?

These list is a very consise and useful set of instructions for effective Twitter use for businesses. Even if you can only manage half of these, you will be doing quite well. Be sure to also follow other similar businesses to your own, and check out some of the top brands to see how they perform.