Twitter Might Yet Help You Build Your Business, But You Can't Wait Around

When Twitter hit the scene a few years ago it was dismissed as yet another 'fad' that wouldn't last long due to a particularly poor feature set. All it allowed you to do was to say what you were up to in 140 characters or fewer. Even SMS allows for more and so this limit was seen as a mistake, I mean, the Internet has limitless amounts of storage so why restrict anyone?

Well, it soon transpired that Twitters restriction was to eventually set it free as one of the fastest growing social networks ever and it has take the Internet world by storm. It was as if Facebook and MySpace had never existed. Suddenly, these darlings of the web were 'so last year' and if you weren't constantly 'tweeting' on your Blackberry or iPhone, you were nobody.

Obviously nobody expected it to take off as well as it did, not least Twitter themselves who suddenly found that they had to invest a fortune in new hardware in order to keep the service on its feet. But this was all down to celebrity and the power of the media, business is still slow to pick up on these things, indeed some wish they would never get involved, but as with everything - without business it would probably fail.

So how can business make the most of Twitter, indeed, how can it use any social networking site in order to further its brand or promote its services?

The most important thing is to take part. In fact, that's all you need to do. These are social networks after all and they are there so you can promote yourself whether you are a business or an individual. Many see it as a hurdle and require courses and manuals before even trying it out, personally I think this is crazy, you don't need a manual to learn how to have a drink with friends in the pub, do you?

Business can take part by simply taking part. By its very nature, social media and especially Twitter is extremely easy to use and be a part of. You don't need a manual or a training course, you just need to do it.