As a self employed individual or owner of a small to medium sized enterprise you have probably read somewhere about the power of social media, including Twitter, a micro-blogging service not dissimilar to sending texts with a limited number of characters.

Twitter has received a bad press in some areas, mainly because the author of the article does not fully understand it. Yes, there are hosts of so called celebrities that publicise their nose blowing moments and, yes, there is a lot of garbage and trivia out there. But despite this, if you need to get your brand out there and connect with your target audiences, you ignore Twitter at your peril.

I’ll come clean and admit that when I first started trying Twitter it just didn’t connect, I did not understand the potential, but thankfully I had a Road to Damascus flash of light and really started to get to grips with what you can do with it. By way of a test last week I posted an article here and did not post a promotional tweet on Twitter. The two days either side of that publication date there were roughly double the amount of visitors to the site. Conclusion: publicising the post on Twitter makes a tremendous difference.

So you want to use Twitter to start to market your business or services, to become an established expert in your field? A word of warning – do not even think of using the main Twitter web interface. A lot of the tools you will need to keep track of your tweets and, as you build up a list of people you want to follow, are not available there and you will need to choose an alternative interface – and there is plenty of choice, both desktop and web-based, plus some for mobile phones, too.

The Big Two for the desktop are Tweetdeck and Seesmic. Both run on a net-based system from Adobe called Air. Both services allow you to arrange a series of columns to monitor tweets – my defaults are all the people I follow, mentions which logs tweets where my @kevincumbria nickname has been used and private where all my direct messages are stored.

In the columns you see an avatar of the person you are following and when you mouse-over this both Tweetdeck and Seesmic provide the options to retweet, reply, DM (direct message in private) the individual to carry out a series of actions from emailing the tweet to blocking the individual. As you collect your followers you will pick up some individuals who have not got the slightest interest in your topic but will either offer certain services or spam you with all manner of garbage. Thankfully Twitter seems to be pretty adept at spotting this behaviour and banning the person concerned. If something creeps in under the radar you can easily block them.

Seesmic is also available as a web-based service but there smart users tend to veer towards Hootsuite. Personally I find it’s screen real estate too cramped, but as ever these things are down to personal taste and this might (hoot) suite you!

As with all things related to social media there are things that you can do and cannot do. If you feel encouraged to pursue Twitter as a marketing tool there is a good choice of books available from the Amazon web store (click the tab on the top of the page) and you should consider Twitter Marketing for Dummies by Kyle Lacey or more general social media marketing I recommend Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith (reviewed here) or Groundswell by Charlene Li and John Bernoff (reviewed here). Please note if you buy any of the books in the web store via these links I make a small affiliate fee.

If you are really impatient I also recommend downloading an eBook The Beginner’s Guide to Twitter by Mike Cliffe Jones which is in PDF format.

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