There are broadly speaking two types of tweople (=people that use Twitter). The first group uses Twitter purely to engage in meaningful conversations, to learn and to share their knowledge.  In this group you can find many avid users that take a very narrow view on what you can and cannot do on Twitter. These are the purists that do not try to gain a large following on Twitter, but just use it to communicate with the people they have selected carefully.  These are the people that use words like ‘serendipity’ to describe their Twitter experience. The second group is looking to Twitter to enhance their business or simply to make money. Their objective is to add as many followers as they can preferably in a well defined target group. For the Tweople in this last group it is already clear that they cannot just blast tweets with ads for their products, but that they have to provide a substantial number of tweets that add value to the reader.

It looks like Twitter, the company itself, is more in favor of getting users that belong to the first group rather than the second. They have put a number of restrictions in place to limit the number of followers a user can acquire during a given period. When Twitter started they only had users that belonged to the first group, so it is understandable that they would try to protect the core of their fans who see Twitter as a social network only that should not be used for marketing.

However there is a dilemma here for Twitter. The company is still searching for a valid business model that would bring in some revenue. To this day Twitter has only spent money, but it hasn’t made a single penny in revenue. Until Twitter comes up with a solid revenue model, it provides a shaky foundation for investors and businesses that want to invest in Twitter applications. It is imperative that this issue is resolved and Twitter is aware of this. That is why they haven’t made it totally impossible to use Twitter for marketing purposes.

It is still possible to gain a lot of followers even if you are not a celebrity, but it will take some time before you reach a substantial number.  By following a large number of Tweople and then unfollowing them when you find out they are not following you back; you can increase your number of followers gradually over time. The problem is that this will take a lot of your time, especially when you try to do this in multiple accounts. Given that you also need to provide interesting tweets, companies would have to spend a substantial amount of time to create a decent following.

As well as the variable distribution channels, leveraging Twitter as a selling channel has another benefit for the users / customers: anonymity. Consumers can eavesdrop and follow messages without giving away their identity, email address, or any other contact info. While a selling dept may not like this ( if the mind-set is to concentrate on harvesting email addresses ), the customers will like it better and should be more ready to take part in a well planned selling event knowing that they are not signing themselves up for a future crammed with promotional spam.

For a CPG company (Consumer Packaged Goods), you could try running a competition or some other promotional program through Twitter that leverages the short-message, group-chat nature of Twitter. Send out clues and have users answer with guesses…

Sponsor a Twitter channel for something in your demographic… Sponsor a live reporter covering something interesting… Do something clever with tweets sent to your account.  It will definitely help if your products are something the tech-hipster, early adopter, social-networking-kids want. Also, bear in mind that you wish to approach with caution — the Twitter demographic isn’t keen on enrolling for spam, or having corporations attack their social scene with advertising, so you want to add value to the conversation.

Social-media tools are fostering consumer service through:

Direct sales: Dell explains it has sold millions worth of refurbished computer parts and obsolete inventory thru its @Dell Outlet account (over 750,000 followers) on Twitter since 2007.

Promotions/Marketing: An obvious temptation for consumer brands is to use their Twitter account for promotions and marketing.   A word of caution here.  You should be aware that overly aggressive marketing will backfire.   Many avid Twitterers see this as a form of spam. They can report to you to Twitter’s spam account which could cause your account to be suspended by Twitter or that they can block your account and when many users block an account again put your might suspend your account.   Unless, like @DellOutlet, you have a specific account that is used only to promote certain products, jobs or services you should be very careful to blast promotional Tweets all the time.  Remember that your tweets should always add value to the reader.  A useful tactic could be   well-defined and executed Twitter-based coupon campaign, or a prize draw with some nice incentives.

Brands aren’t about ‘messages’ anymore – brands today are conversations — and today the most important conversations are happening through social media such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace.

I have seen a lot of people following thousands of tweople and I always asked myself how they manage to handle so many users. Now with the list function, users will have a new tool that will help them to manage Twitter in a simple manner.   They can create lists of tweople they really want to read tweets from, while their following can grow unlimitedly, so it can be used for marketing purposes.  In other words, the lists bridge the gap that existed between the ‘purists’ that want to use Twitter only for their personal enrichment and the ‘marketing’ folks that just want as large a following as possible to have the largest reach for their promotional tweets.

To get started with lists, there are a few basic things to keep in mind.  The first thing is to plan ahead for best results. First, make sure you share your lists outside of Twitter. Everyone is thinking about sharing his or her lists within Twitter, but don’t stop there. Share the links to your lists on your website or blog. Lists can be accessed via a web address like: http://twitter.com/user_name/list_name. To promote your list on your website, just add a link with this address. Don’t forget to promote your lists on FaceBook, in email signatures, and in your newsletters.  Secondly, give your lists a good name.  After all when you give your list a name this will become part of the URL, people will see this and should be able to remember this.   Naming your lists may not be as important as choosing your Twitter user name, but it is still important. You want the name to be enticing, but it should accurately describe what kind of list it is.  Finally, create lists with a target audience in mind. Think strategically, take a marketing approach and think of lists as a marketing tool. Ask yourself these questions: “What kind of information is my target user interested in?” and “How can I make it interesting enough for him to follow my list”.  For example, let’s say you are a realtor. You would like to attract potential homebuyers in the Boston area. Your target audience would be (first-time) homebuyers and people thinking of selling their house. You should be able to find several bloggers and home magazines on Twitter that tweet about home buying, loan types, the home buying process, mortgages and interest rates. Surely you can find several tweople who tweet about Boston neighborhood statistics or tweet links to articles and blogs on the subject.  Put all of these sources together in a list and you have created a valuable tool for people that could be your prospective customers. Now all you have to do is promote your list in every place you can think of and see the followers of your list (which are your prospects) grow.

Lists are public by default, but you can make them private, which makes sense if you are just using them to organize what tweets to read.  The lists you have created are linked from your profile. Other Twitter users can decide to subscribe to your lists. This means lists can be an important new discovery mechanism for great tweets and tweople.

When you follow a list, you can see it in the “Lists” section in the right-hand side of your Twitter home page. There are different ways to find lists to follow.  You can use Twitter under ‘People You Follow’ on the profile page of anyone on Twitter, and you can see all of the public lists they have created and all the lists they follow. You can also see the lists that person appears on. Checking out the lists that your close friends have created, follow, or appear on, is a good way to locate lists you might be interested in.  It is expected that many third party applications will come out with list functionality.  Listorious is a good example of such an app.  It maintains a rapidly growing directory of Twitter lists. You can search or browse through many lists by category and check out the most popular lists in different areas.

The Lists API has now been updated as well. This will allow developers to add support for lists into their Twitter apps. Business usage of Twitter Lists is one of the challenges that new Twitter users face in finding interesting users to follow. There are several third-party tools to help you decide who to follow, by allowing you to search their Bios and their tweets. Developers will be able to grasp the API and use its functionality to add the Twitter lists feature into their apps. The management of your lists is a manual activity and may take up quite a lot of your time.  So it is expected that many third party developers will come up with clever additions to their software to automate the creation and maintenance of Twitter lists.

All in all, the addition of lists to Twitter is a great idea.  As long as you make your lists public, everyone can enjoy the fruits of your labor. The fact that these lists can be made searchable on the Twitter site itself means more exposure for your own Twitter account. Alternately, you can keep the list private and just use it as a way to stay connected inter-office.  Make some clever lists and share them with others, ask them to follow your list and see your popularity grow. There is no better way to network than to have a lot of interested readers! In the end, lists can really help Twitter users enjoy their experience in the Twitterverse and also use it for their own business purposes. Who knows what they will come up with next!

When people first encounter Twitter they just don’t ‘get it’. They think it is rather silly to start sending SMSes that the whole world can see. Just about all people that first encounter Twitter have a similar reaction. It takes a while before people start to recognize how powerful Twitter can be.

Especially Business people have a tendency to overlook social networking as a valuable business tool. They are busy running their company and they usually ignore the social networking sites altogether.

That is mistake number one. Social networking has become a major driver of traffic on the Internet and businesses need to take this seriously if they don’t want to miss out on a great opportunity. Every company today should have a FaceBook account and engage in conversations with their customers and prospects on Twitter.

After all, businesses are a collection of individuals and these individuals start to express themselves on the Internet more and more. Through the social networking sites employees are engaging in conversations with their friends and family and increasingly with total strangers. There is great value for businesses to tap into this source and generate more brand awareness and traffic to their websites.

Twitter is especially suited for this purpose. Be- cause tweets are easy to read and easy to write, it wouldn’t take much for a business to actively use this medium.

Twitter is a hot social networking tool, but business owners can really profit from it. Twitter is fast, free and simple way to get immediate results for your business. You can increase your traffic today, and reap the benefits quickly.

Here are some ways your business can profit from Twitter:

1. Find local people you can network with or find local events to meet local customers. Use the search feature (http://search.twitter.com) to find people who are near you, then follow them. Especially for business professionals like lawyers, doctors and accountants this is a great way to find new customers.

2. Get great quality traffic by sending messages (“tweets”) that are meaningful and helpful. Twitter users come from many walks of life and income levels, so build a relationship with them to get the best results.

3. Remember the old saying, “It’s not what you know but who you know that counts”? That is true on Twitter, as well. If you need a favor, send out a tweet – you never know who can help (or who knows someone who can help).

4. Know the power of the “re-tweet,” which is what it is called when someone takes a message (“tweet”) you send and then sends it to their followers. It is sort of like the way a forwarded email works. Send a quality tweet to your followers and see how it gets passed along to others.

5. Use the search feature to find like-minded people across the world. Use it to find people who may not possess the same talents as you, but complement your talents.

Twitter is an excellent tool for building your on- line business. If it is used properly, it is a free asset to your Internet marketing plan. Let’s investigate the few areas in which a business could use Twitter to their advantage.

You always hear people talking about social networking sites like MySpace, Friendster and Facebook. Forget about those sites and check out Twitter! Everyone is all hot and bothered by the new internet craze called Twitter. It is on the lips of every CNN news anchor, Conan O’Brien talks about it on the Tonight Show on NBC, and even recently my own mother has started twittering.

Twitter is a great way to keep in touch with friends, family, co-workers and other people you who want to know what’s going on in your life when you want them to. You can send out tweets through your phone or computer and people can follow you through their phone or computer.

More than just a large way to “text the world” Twitter has become a way to reach a large amount of people in a very short span of time with a very short number of characters. It’s great for on the go and when there’s too much people to stay in touch with you can just twitter to let them know what’s been going on with you.

You can also send a twitpic, which lets you share pictures with your followers. For example, when you are on vacation, take a picture with your camera phone and upload it straight to twitpic from your phone to let your followers see what you’re doing at that very moment.

Try using the search engine and find your family and friends who may be on twitter. You might want to follow people as well and get their updates. You can reply directly to your friends twitter updates and they can do the same. You don’t have to worry about privacy because you can make your page private and only let your friends view your updates or you can make it public for everyone to view.

You can control who follows you also by accepting or denying peoples requests. If you don’t know anyone on twitter there is a “Suggested Users” page where you can find interesting people to follow.
A lot of celebrities are on twitter too. Try doing a name search to find your favorite celebrity and follow them to get their updates. You’ll find everyone and anyone on twitter.

Also try following your favorite television show or your favorite store you love to shop at. It’s a great way to find out when the store is having a sale or other great deals. I used the “invite by email” page on twitter and got all my family and friends to sign up and follow me and I’m following them too.

I know in my experience I have used Twitter in more than just a causal way. I have found that Twitter can be a useful funnel of people into your own blog or actual money making website.

The thing is that you have to have a good hook. You have to have a gimmick that no one else uses. For me, I have used a “joke a day” idea to keep people interested in my website. The jokes pertain to the topic of my website and I include a link to my website in each Twitter post.

This idea can be adapted in a number of ways for your website or business. If you have a humorous business you can go the “joke a day” route. Serious business men might not want their business promoted by whatever lame quips you have hired the temp to come up with.

You can also try a “fact of the day” but make sure to make it interesting and make sure it relates to the type of business you are trying to promote using Twitter. Once people are hooked on your “whatever it is of the day” then you can watch the ad dollars start rolling in.

It doesn’t take much time to set up a Twitter account or to come up with a bunch of jokes, or ideas, or facts of the day. All you need is 20 minutes on Google and you are all hooked up.
Who knows, once this Twitter craze dies down, your company might still be known as that one place where they give out the interesting facts, or silly puns.

I would image that once you have hooked your new clients in with Twitter, your fabulous customer service and dedication to a quality product will take over.

No matter what age you are, twitter is great, fun and easy to use.

Twitter provides a way for computers and other devices to inform people about their status or their findings in a friendly manner. At this sector headquarters in California they had eclipsed a planned with a sensor that checks the humidity of the soil. Whenever is time for the planned to get some water it will post its tweet saying something like: “Water me!”

Many other devices can follow this example. What about a washing machine that warns you about not having enough soap, or detecting a colored item in the white wash or simply to inform you that he has finished his load. The ice cream truck that constantly tweets its location, is the replacement of the annoying music these trucks usually make, to alert people that they are in the neighborhood.  In New York City a moving truck started to tweet his location and availability to carry a new load, which has caused a fad, which is why everybody with a truck in New York is now using Twitter. True, it is usually the truck driver that does the tweeting here, but it could easily be the truck itself.

Gartner predicts that by 2012 20% of non-video Internet data is comprised of physical sensors reporting their status. That is an amazing prediction. Just think about how many sensors would be transmitting data.  These sensors can easily be programmed to send to tweet in exception cases, so people can take the appropriate action.  This is a usage of Twitter that has yet to be explored, but provides very interesting possibilities.

Today Tweeteronix launches a book and an application on Twitter.  The combination creates a unique proposition for the market: all buyers of the book will get a free subscription to the Tweeteronix application.  Author Dick Raman wrote a brilliant book on the use of Twitter for Business and Pleasure.   The application is designed for businesses and bloggers that would let users automatically build up a substantial following in a number of accounts, while tweeting interesting messages on behalf of their business.

Dick Raman, a renowned Entrepreneur, Speaker and Author, clearly positions Twitter as the new way to stay in touch with what is happening in the world now. Twitter is the next generation web: the real-time stream of information, anyone can dip into and join the conversation on any given topic. At the same time the book explains clearly what businesses small and large can do with Twitter and how Bloggers can get more readers.

Erik Verhaar, Publisher said: “This is a very powerful book: it is a complete guide to Twitter that describes not only how Twitter works, but also the logic behind it, the context in which it can be used as well as the applications for businesses. The author manages to provide a level of depth, seldom seen in books of this kind. It offers the reader all the tools to get everything possible out of Twitter.”

The book also describes the Tweeteronix application. This application distinguishes itself from other Twitter applications by its sophisticated engine that is designed to automatically build up a substantial, but targeted following.   The application offers many user-defined settings that can create a meaningful group of followers for multiple Twitter accounts.  It allows the user to post predefined tweets that are relevant for his audience, so he can build a solid relationship with his followers.   Since everything is on autopilot, users would not have to spend much time doing this, which helps the busy executives to save time.  Tweeteronix provides a low-cost way to reach the point, where businesses can use the power of Twitter for marketing their business in a unique and meaningful manner.

You can find the application on http://Tweeteronix.com you can order the book there as well

I first heard about Twitter over two years ago, when I was perusing fitness blogs. Some of the fitness bloggers had taken to using Twitter in order to track their daily food intake, meal-by-meal. Although this was before Twitter had applications that allowed for better smartphone functionality, such as TwitterBerry and TweetDeck, which would have allowed them to tweet what they were eating immediately after a meal, it still seemed like a convenient tool. I gave it a shot, but never really got into it then. My Twitter quickly stagnated, and I never would have guessed that a little less than two years later, Twitter would become a pop culture sensation.

I can’t remember exactly how Twitter started becoming so popular. Something about Ashton Kutcher and Shaquille O’Neal having a Twitter, so I decided to sign back up. As soon as I signed in, I saw that I could follow so many more celebrities than just them, although the list only extended from “celebrities I kind of like” to “celebrities I don’t really even know.”

I followed, and then quickly unfollowed, Stephen Fry. As lovable as the man is, he Twitters too damn much. Twitter has been a bastion of (mostly useless) information as well. I learned from Cesar Milan (the Dog Whisperer) that dogs sweat through the pads of their feet, and I was one of the first to know that Gavin Newsom would be running for governor of California, as his very first announcement was through his own Twitter. I know when a Twittering baseball player feels like he has tendinitis, and when he feels like it’s just shoulder soreness, and I now know that the writers of the Office act a great deal like the fictional writers of 30 Rock.

I stopped Twittering about a month after I joined, because I realized that, even though I think it’s hilarious, no one really cares that my dog almost burst through the sliding glass door in her (successful) attempt to eat a fly. However Twitter is definitely still a feature in my daily “rotation” of the ten or so sites that I visit multiple times on a daily basis. However, I’m a fickle follower, and I find myself deleting 3-4 more Twitters from my follow list per week. And as tech savvy as I am, I still don’t quite get the re-tweet thing. What, @ replies weren’t good enough?

One lesser-known feature, in terms of how to use it, is the trending hash #. Used for games, protests, and just plain silly Internet themes, the trending hash is placed in front of a word or phrase to make it stand out when talking among people. That way, when searching trends, the hash mark makes a common phrase for a game stand out among ways it may be used in other tweets.

One popular Trend is called #blamedrewscancer. Twitter users #blamedrewscancer for things that go poorly, and BlameDrewsCancer,com records it, hoping for a company to sponsor each blame towards a cancer foundation.

Twitter is something that is here to stay. People devoted to other Social Networking sites will eventually come around and see that Twitter is a fantastic communication too. It’s ease of use, unique features and variety of people is a testament to it’s lasting power.

You can follow anyone, from ZombieCptPicard to MSNBC. GossipGirl updates you on that guilty pleasure show you watch, and your best friend complains about the homework they forgot until last minute.

In the age of communication, I highly recommend everyone starts Tweeting. Otherwise, you’re just out of the loop.