I get a lot of articles in the mail each week. Many of them are great, but just don’t fit well enough with the blogs format to run. Recently, Caroline Middlebrook contacted me with her fantastic guide to Twitter. While it is really far too long for me to reproduce here, I thought I’d take the opportunity to share some of that parts that I found the most interesting.

Can Twitter Be Used For Business?

A lot of people just don’t get Twitter, they don’t see any value in it. Now if you are using it from a purely personal perspective then really, it is nothing more than a time consuming distraction.

The value comes if you have some kind of business / service / organisation that you want to promote. For example, you might have a standard online or offline business, or perhaps you are an artist, musician etc and want to get your work out into the community… Maybe you work for a charity and would like to gain more public awareness of it. There are many reasons why you might want to go looking for an audience beyond just your own friends and family.

It is well known that the more contact you make with a customer, the more likely you are to make a sale. These days it is much more ‘in vogue’ to sell by not selling, rather than doing the hard-push sales pitch. Twitter is a way of doing that. With Twitter you can chat to people in a friendly way and give them nudges and hints about what you’re doing in your world. Look at the benefits:

• It reminds them that you exist
• It shows them that you are human
• It allows you to mention new offers immediately
• It allows you to form a more casual relationship

Twitter Productivity Tools

LoudTwitter – Publishes a daily post on your blog containing a digest of all your tweets of that day. See part 5 of the guide for more information about this.

Remember the Milk for Twitter- Remember the Milk (rtm) is a popular GTD web application. By adding the rtm Twitter member as a friend you can send commands to your account via the Twitter interface. This is particularly useful if you are using Twitter by SMS when you are out and about and you only have your mobile phone and no Internet access.

RSS2Twitter – Allows any RSS feed to be fed to a Twitter account. Useful if you want to keep track of blog updates when you’re mobile perhaps.

ServerMojo – Monitors your web server and will send you update notifications via Twitter.

SugarStats – If you are diabetic then check out SugarStats. This site allows you to monitor your sugar levels and gives you all sorts of graphs and charts. Plus you can send in your data via Twitter.

TwitterDigest – Twitter Digest lets you read Twitter updates in a more manageable fashion. Just pick the usernames you’d like to generate a digest for, and you will see all updates made by them during the past full day.

TwitterFeed – Automatically feeds your blog posts through to Twitter. Very handy if you post a lot.

Twitterment – A search engine for Twitter.

TwitterNotes – Make notes using Twitter and tag them for later use.

Twitticious – This little application will allow you to setup an automatic import of links from any Twitter timeline (even the public one) into a Delicious account for later tagging.

Twitter Groups

Twitter Groups is a third party service that offers functionality sorely needed by Twitter (and indeed many other social networks). One of the problems that I alluded to in the earlier parts of the guide are that you need to decide whether you want your Twitter account to represent your personal or business life.

Of course it’s never that simple is it? See the trouble is that you may have close friends and potential clients following the same account. How then do you tailor your tweets to the audience without alienating some of them? You can’t with Twitter in its current form.

Twitter Groups allows you to sort the people that follow you into groups and then send updates to just a particular group. Personally I think a simple tagging approach would have been easier but it’s better than nothing. If you have multiple audiences this is well worth a try until Twitter put in some official support for this functionality.

Web 2.0 Roundup

There is an absolute ton of great information in this guide. A lot of it is geared towards marketers, but the list of tools, mashups and other twitter-tech is about as complete as I have ever seen. Be sure to take a look at the complete guide, if you couldn’t figure out why anyone would ever want to use Twitter — this might help.

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