Can you use something as simple as Twitter for business? Absolutely! However, you can't exactly adopt the usual salesperson "Sell! Sell! Sell!" mentality on Twitter. To operate as a successful business presence on Twitter:

Twitter is a conversational medium, and for businesses to mesh well with user expectations, companies and businesses need to understand how to navigate the landscape as a brand. You can read about strategies and case studies in Chapter 11 (no bankruptcy pun intended).

If you're managing a Twitter presence on behalf of your company, we highly encourage you to start a separate account for yourself so that you can get used to the service. Before you start tweeting on behalf of your business, know what users expect from brands and businesses, and how customers like to be approached. Getting used to how businesses operate on Twitter can prevent you from making a serious faux pas down the road. That said, a lot of what makes the best business accounts great is their personality and humanity, so the case can also be made not to always have two different (business and personal) accounts.

In Chapter 11, we go over how businesses can best take advantage of Twitter.

Although Twitter can be a powerful tool for business owners and employees, it's just as powerful for individuals who really have no intention of conducting any sort of business on it (although business might happen accidentally).

Twitter was originally popular helping individuals keep in touch with their friends and acquaintances via mini-updates. Many personal Twitterers still tend to use Twitter in this manner, updating a close circle of friends about thoughts and happenings in their lives. Over time, you can keep up with — and even make new — friends you might otherwise not contact often. Twitter removes many communication barriers.

A few things to consider for your personal Twitter presence:

Some of the most successful Twitter personalities have embraced Twitter by transparently sharing personal, professional, family, and other aspects of themselves all rolled together. This is nothing wildly new. We've always spent time with colleagues, clients, and our professional network at the golf course, out to dinner, attending charity events, and the like. Most networking events have a highly social component to them. It's simple: People like to do business with people they like.

Some find balancing your personal life and your professional life on Twitter tricky at first, but you can definitely do it. Give yourself time to discover what you're comfortable doing. We don't really know anyone who completely stops talking about work when out with friends — or vice versa — because work (whether we like it or not) is a big part of who we all are. Because Twitter is built for human communications, it can handle many facets of your life; you just have to find your own balance.

Although you have little direct control over who follows you, you can easily see what sort of user you're attracting. Browse through your list of Followers and click through to open some of their profiles to get a general idea of who's following you (on any Twitter screen, click the Followers link under your name in the sidebar).

When you look into who's following you, you might realize that you're drawing unexpected people as followers. Reaching people and businesses you never expected to reach is most likely not a bad thing. If you're a business, unpredicted followers could show that you're increasing your business's social reach, meaning a sign of successful Twitter use. If you're twittering as an individual, you're broadening your horizons — and other users consider you and your tweets interesting.

You can help guide who tends to follow you by talking about a myriad of topics. People aren't one-dimensional, and no one really expects you to be on-point all the time. Although you may have interests that you talk about more than others, getting a sense of what you're talking about and whom you're talking to can come in handy — it enables you to target your tweets to topics that are most interesting to your followers.

One of our favorite tools for understanding how often and what you're updating is TweetStats (www.tweetstats.com). This tool enables you to see who you're talking to, when you're talking, and what you're talking about — all in graph form. Figure 10-2 shows an example of the type of information TweetStats reports.

Figure 10.2. You can see a graph of your tweet density.

If you're targeting specific people with whom you want to interact more regularly, find a way to add value to the interactions for them. You can target these types of people by searching keywords and hashtags for that topic and seeing who uses them and who the real leaders appear to be. Once you're following a few key people within that interest area, look for whom they talk to, listen to, and value. For example, if you're a gardener, check to see who Martha Stewart (@MarthaStewart) follows and talks to about gardening topics. Click through any appealing @replies and consider following those people. You can also use this information to get a sense of what's important to any given twitterer and what types of information they like to receive. With Twitter, you can essentially browse not only the connections between people, but also between topics of interest. You can also easily drop into active ongoing conversations about specific themes. One or two key people can lead you to an entire subject matter landscape on Twitter.

In a very real sense, an individual or Twitter account that represents something can become the foundation for a community. Likewise, if you're trying to target a specific type of individual, go to the Twitter streams of those individuals and see what they're tweeting about. Join the conversation that they're having with other people and engage those other people, as well. Over time, if you're adding value to that conversation, then other people look to you as a person who's involved and relevant in that community, whether it's computer programming, baking cupcakes, or cancer research.

While you start to gain a foothold within communities on Twitter, you might want to get a sense of what your network looks like and how far your updates travel.

Do your messages spread? In her keynotes, Laura argues that messages can be much more important influencers within Twitter than influential accounts and individuals, because good messages get repeated. A truly great message, even if it starts in quiet little corners of Twitter among people with small following networks, will echo and get repeated until eventually it reaches much of the network.

Twitter itself has a very primitive way of measuring your reach: You have following and followers counts. Although those numbers would seem to provide a good baseline for understanding how far your updates go and to whom, they don't say much about what types of people follow you and how influential those followers are. In response, the Twitter community has developed a number of tools to help gauge and measure influence and reach. Less ethical people aggressively boost their follower numbers, sometimes through questionable habits like following people just until they follow back and then dropping them to go follow someone else. Important lessons? Don't automatically trust an account with a really high number of followers. Don't build your network around high numbers at the cost of high relevance and high engagement.

Twinfluence (www.twinfluence.com), shown in Figure 10-3, and TwitterGrader (http://twitter.grader.com), shown in Figure 10-4, can help you figure out how you compare with other users, but even they use fairly arbitrary measures. You can also use these sites to determine who the popular users are in your geographical location.

Figure 10.3. Twinfluence stats, showing @algore's popularity.

For major cities, such as New York, Boston, and San Francisco, there might just be too many twitterers for these tools to really help you; but in smaller towns and metropolises, these statistics might quickly help you identify some real community leaders whose tweets would contain valuable information about the area and connection to others there.

Figure 10.4. TwitterGrader, suggesting the humble @pistachio's visibility.

Twitter, by itself, can tell you only the number of people you follow and the number of people who follow you. As described in the previous section, those numbers give you just part of the story.

If 100 people follow you and communicate with you, then your actual extended network is much larger than 100 people because conversations relay messages and connect new people on Twitter. Say that Follower #86 has 1,000 followers. Whenever Follower #86 mentions your name, 1,000 people receive an update that contains your name. And you may find that kind of exposure quite useful. Twitter is an excellent way to "harness the power of loose ties" or benefit from friends of friends of friends who are more likely to know about things nobody in your social group knows.

If Boston-based Laura was trying to locate a venue in Nashville, Tennessee, to hold a Twitter marketing seminar, she might send an update that reads, "Trying to locate a good 700-person venue in Nashville to give a talk. A place to stay would be nice, too. Suggestions?" Because thousands of people read Laura's Twitter stream, chances are good someone lives in Nashville. If any of those handful wanted to connect Laura with a local business owner, they might ask their own networks, who may have an answer based on their own geography. In this sense, Laura's primary network gives her secondary access to all her follower's networks, as well.

It's pretty cool how friends of friends can end up becoming your direct friends, too. Say you're following five friends, and two of them are constantly communicating (via @replies) with some other person whom you don't know. Out of curiosity, you may start following that other person just to make sense of your friends' conversations. Because you're friends with two people that the other person talks to frequently, he follows you back. Now, all of a sudden, you have both a larger Twitter network and extended network.

You see the phrase "join the conversation" bandied about a lot on Twitter. If you're representing a business, you can get a dialog going very easily: Just search for users who have mentioned your products or the types of problems you solve and follow them. If you have something relevant to say, engage them in conversation using the mention they made as a starting point.

If you're representing a business, mentioning little-known facts or interesting things about what you do or sell can start a conversation. You can also talk about your staff; tell interested twitterers how you (or someone else) make what you sell; or take the easiest route of all and ask your fellow Twitter users what they think of your product or service, and how they think you can improve or expand.

By way of getting started, many new users start sharing links with a bit of commentary on their Twitter stream, as shown in Figure 10-5. For many users, sending a link provides a great way to get a commentary started about something you find interesting. Give it a shot and see what happens. Here are the basics for sharing links. (You'll probably want to use a link shortener most of the time, though. Review Chapter 9 for a refresher on how to do that.)

Some users post a lot of links — some users like to use RSS or other tools to automatically update their Twitter streams with links to interesting articles that they're reading. Others just post links by hand.

Figure 10.5. This update comments on a link and includes that link.

Your update stream is by far the most important part of your Twitter profile. However, your profile's presentation also needs to reflect something about you. In the same way that you wear a nice set of clothes to a job interview, you want to dress up your profile so that it reflects the image that you want to convey to the world.

Whether you're a business or a private citizen, your followers and potential followers react much more favorably if you include in your Twitter profile a photo of yourself and a link to something about you. People like to know who they're talking to, and when you present an image that reflects who you are, other people become willing to be honest and open with you.

Too many team members to list? You can show them off in your background graphic the way @CoTweet itself does. (Note: In the interest of full disclosure, Laura is an adviser for @CoTweet.) Check out Chapter 11 for more recommendations on the best ways for businesses to tweet.

Figure 10.6. You can "sign" Tweets by author by using cotags in CoTweet.

Authentic people and businesses, using Twitter in a real and interactive way, can experience tremendous growth and return on investment from Twitter because they make real contributions and build up a rich base of trust, influence, and social capital. People respond much better to an authentic, human voice. They engage more closely because they feel comfortable responding, retweeting, and otherwise paying attention to the genuine voice. Bring some value to the twitterverse by adding your authentic contributions, whatever those may be.

For example, if you're tweeting about politics, whether you're a conservative, moderate, liberal, apathetic, or whatever, feel free to agree or disagree with someone — Twitter is, after all, a digital extension of real life, so if you want to engage in that type of dialog, be yourself. Don't try to come off as something you're not just to appeal to people.

Your update stream speaks volumes about you. Twitter is a network built on trust and relationships, and being insincere jeopardizes the quality and effectiveness of your network, both on- and offline. You lose some of that hard-won trust that you've been building since you joined Twitter.

When you're on Twitter as an individual, if you share a favorite cause or a local event in a way that makes it interesting to others, you'll attract those with common interests. They may get involved and show support, and the more fellow twitterers know about you and about the things you have in common, the more connections and ideas will flow in your network.

Don't be afraid to voice your support for social causes and charities. By tweeting about your cause, you both spread awareness about what's important to you (which may lead to more contributions for that cause or charity) and give your audience a better idea of who you are as a person.

So, if you're passionate about cancer research, domestic violence, or another cause and want to have a fundraiser for it, a Twitter update that you send about the fundraiser might get repeated and reach 50, 500, 5,000, or 50,000 people (or more) who are directly and indirectly connected to you. Spread the love!

Many have raised money for worthy causes right on Twitter. One of the first was Beth Kanter (@kanter) whose network sent a Cambodian woman to college in a matter of a few hours of Twitter conversation about it and links to a donation site. For more about Twitter and charity, see Chapter 13.

Many people opt to not even use the real names of family members or children who don't use Twitter. Twitterers commonly refer to relatives, friends, and kids by nicknames or initials, just to give those loved ones a layer of protection. Use a bit of caution and ask permission before tweeting someone's real name (or any other information that we mention). Laura, for example, uses her daughters' initials S and Z, as shown in Figure 10-7. Twitter is a powerful influence on search engines, so casual mentions of unique names remain findable for a long time. If Laura even used their first names on her tweets (which all also contain her last name), they'd likely appear visibly in Google search results for their firstname lastname. Don't believe her? A Google search for Z Fitton (or Z Fitton Pistachio) brings up a few recent tweets about her antics.

The same words of caution go for any number of personal details. Dive into information about your health or your private life in private conversation. Although being authentic and a little bit personal goes a long way on Twitter, everyone understands that you need a layer of privacy to keep you, your loved ones, and the details about them safe.

Figure 10.7. Laura (@pistachio) referencing her spawn in a tweet.

After you Twitter for a while, you've given away a lot of information about yourself. If you mention who you spend time with or that you always hang out at a certain cafe, someone can start tracking where you've been and what you're doing. We don't want to scare you — but whenever you post in a public medium, anyone could go through the information you've published, later on, and start piecing things together. Laura loves the unique charms of her neighborhood and street, but she keeps the details really fuzzy, preferring Boston as specific enough.