"I Refuse to Tweet!"
By Jim Daniels

Despite its spectacular rise, many people give you strange looks when you say you Twitter. So what exactly is Twitter?

The owners of Twitter.com suggest that it is a way to communicate with others by providing quick and frequent answers to the simple question – What are you doing?

Basically, Twitter is a social networking service that allows users to send and receive user updates. These updates are known as ‘tweets’ and have a maximum length of 140 characters. Because of this, Twitter has also been termed a micro-blogging service.

Of course, many tweets are extremely mundane and many people (me?) question why this service should be so popular. For example, you may not be all that interested in what your friend had for breakfast.

I'm not.

For that matter, I'm not interested in broadcasting what I had for breakfast either. I've got enough to do.

I don't have time to tweet!

And that folks, is exactly why I may be one of the last Twitter "holdouts".

Of course, that's just me. Maybe I'm showing some stubbornness as I approach middle-age.

After all, there are many business owners using Twitter as a productivity tool.

For example, you can use it to maintain a to-do list or send yourself a reminder. Because you can also send messages via SMS (aka text messaging), this can be useful when you don’t have access to your computer.

Many people with tweeting time on their hands are also using Twitter to grow "followings".

At Twitter.com you can establish groups by ‘following’ your friends and having them follow you. In this way, you can update all of them at once. If you can’t make an appointment you can simply send ‘ Sorry, can’t make it tonight’.

Think about that for a moment and you'll realize that Twitter has all sorts of marketing applications.

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OK, since Twitter lets you grow a following and send updates to them whenever you want, the obvious marketing application is to grow a large following and sell your stuff to them.

Of course that's a very basic interpretation. Rather than "selling" you'd be wise to simply "update" folks regularly about your new product ideas, product releases, etc.

A soft-sell will work FAR better with Twitter. Remember, people want to know "what you're doing", not what you're selling.

Another great facet of Twitter is that it is RSS feed enabled. If you don’t have the time to maintain a blog about your product or service you can still keep clients updated if they subscribe to your feed. For example, a video store owner could send a message about the latest video release.

But if you plan to use Twitter for marketing applications, don't overdo it. While Twitter is being used by some business owners as a valuable marketing tool, unfortunately, there are some who take advantage of this and try to spam the system.

Remember, Twitter itself is not a marketing tool. It is a communication tool that can be use for a variety of applications. Marketing is just one of them. But you have to be smart and creative.

And you have to have a lot of extra time on your hands. And that's the main caveat in my opinion...

Tweeting can become a terrible time waster if you aren’t disciplined. So if you do decide to try it, set aside a set amount of time, say 20 minutes, in the morning and the same again in the evening. If it becomes too annoying you can send the command Off, Sleep, or Stop to Twitter. If you only twitter from your computer then simply avoid the website.

Oh, and don't worry about getting any annoying tweets from me telling you I'm sitting down to write my newsletter or looking for my golf ball in the woods on the 18th hole.

I just ain't tweetin' ... at least not yet.

See ya in a few weeks...
Jim Daniels
JDD Publishing Co.