What are the business uses for Twitter we muse....

The world of Twitter (www.twitter.com) has been in the forefront of our minds at Tailored Time Towers and thus, we have been musing about whether it really does have a use as an everyday business tool for a business to business SME. The short answer is no we dont think, but its a damned fine way of wasting lots of time. However, please read on and we look forward to our dear readers proving us different.

Suddenly Twitter came into the common conciousness in the new year and everyone is talking about it. Schools have started to include it in the syllabus for young children and they have even put together a Masters Degree at Birmingham City University. Hilariously, this degree is offering a £4,400 one-year Masters in Social Media, which covers sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Bebo. Students will learn how to set up blogs and podcasts online and also how to use the sites in communications and marketing. "Virtually all of the content of this course is so basic it can be self-taught," one student said.... you don't say.

Anyway, we dont need any excuses to try out something 'new' so we have got our Tailored Time tweets going and this is what we have found out so far:

The blurring of personal and business uses: think about this when you set up your profile because what you are sharing personally might not be the best thing to share with your business clients. Do you really want people to know what you are doing every second, is it a good idea that they also link up with your staff (remember hideous stories from facebook of people putting up pics of themselves having a wild time at the weekend and getting caught out when pretending to have a sickie)... we arent so sure its such a good idea. These boundaries might not be so defined for the likes of Stephen Fry and Brittany Spears and its all good for their PR but is it really going to work for you, fellow business owner?

Allocate a set amount of time: as with lots of new 'self taught' projects, it can swallow a huge amount of time - you have to educate yourself about it, understand what you want to post (see below) and then keep the momentum going. If you don't keep posting, your listeners are going to loose interest.

Selecting your followers: we signed up and within minutes we had followers (we now have 27 and counting!) but only a handful actually know us. From what we can see its not as easy as Facebook or Linked In to find people from your Outlook, right now you can only scan your hotmail account.

What to post: You need to ask yourself what you want to say to the world; as we have already got a blog we are already 'broadcasting' but really, even the most exciting things can sound mundane and trite with a minimum of 140 characters.... Do you post ' just out to lunch now' or do you show off... 'just landed a brilliant client!'; if you read other more famous people's tweets they are amazingly dull....

Best uses for business so far: the likes of Starbucks are really using Twitter for a good use, increasing brand awareness, telling the world about new products, building a fan base. http://twitter.com/Starbucks Right now, we think that the best way a smaller business could use Twitter would be if they were running a specific event, targetted at a user group - this way you could build interest and ultimately get lots of delegates/attendees coming your way if it is done correctly.

So effectively the jury is out, you can follow us if you want to hear our tweets! https://twitter.com/tailoredtime but whether we can be bother to post information to yet another interface is yet to be seen (more passwords to remember, more places to log into to check out any updates... information overload argh!!!)

As always we would love to hear what you think about this and what you have learnt too so feel free to post and share your thoughts!