Twitter (www.twitter.com) is getting quite a bit of press in the mainstream media right now, but it has been online since August 2006. For those of you new to Twitter, it is a website where you can post an answer to the question ‘What are you doing?’

If you’ve ever used Facebook (www.facebook.com) and updated your status on a regular basis, then you’ll ‘get’ Twitter.

It’s free to sign up for a Twitter account, and you can customise your Twitter page with your own graphical background and add a profile image. Your friends, family and colleagues can then ‘follow’ you on Twitter. This means that your updates – or ‘tweets’ as they are called – will show up on their Twitter page. People can respond to your tweets if they want to, so the conversation can be two way. Some individuals are followed by hundreds of thousands of Twitter users. Take Barack Obama, for example. He has 548,910 followers (http://twitter.com/BarackObama). Other top ‘Twitterers’ include Britney Spears, CNN Breaking News, The New York Times, Stephen Fry and Al Gore. Visit http://twitterholic.com/ to discover more of the most followed people on Twitter.

Twitter updates are limited to just 140 characters, so it really forces people to be concise in describing what they are doing. Updates can be received on your cellphone, and you can also update your Twitter account by cellphone.

So what about the business applications of Twitter? Well for starters, if you want to tap into some of the brightest business minds in the world you can follow them via Twitter. In fact there is a whole site dedicated to the tweets of leading entrepreneurs ExecTweets – check it out at www.exectweets.com. Having a Twitter account for your business is also another way to increase your profile online and get more visitors to your website or blog.

Now if you are thinking ‘Oh no, not another site to update!’ then relax. If you are writing a blog you can sync your blog and your Twitter account so whenever you post a new blog a Tweet is sent to your Twitter account about the new blog. We think that’s pretty cool.

Give us a call on 03 366 3340 if you would like more information about customising your Twitter account and having your website publish updates to Twitter.