Clebrity Night Shot

Definition of Twitter - a service for friends, family and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: "what are you doing?".

Twitter is a combination of the various forms of communication online with the main difference being that posts, or tweets, are restricted to 140 characters or less. If you are registered on Twitter you can post updates, or tweets, follow and view the updates posted from other users and send private direct messages or a public reply to another user.

Twitter has become a source of news due to tweets by people in the midst of newsworthy events. Most current users tweet shared links to interesting content on the web, conversations around hot topics, photos, videos, music and real time events.

Big business have become aware of the power of Twitter and are running marketing campaigns on Twitter with the aim of reaching as many people as possible. Celebrities are making use of Twitter to connect with their fans more directly and sharing snippets of their daily lives. Bill Gates recently joined Twitter and had a huge following within the first 24 hours.

Decide on your account name

More than 15 million people are expected to be on Twitter by the end of 2010. It is therefore extremely important to ensure that you claim your full name and any of your product names or your company name. Some of the bigger companies learned the hard way when they found that their company name were already registered to other users. They then had to settle for a different name or had to buy back their name at a steep price.

Build your profile

Your profile is very important and creates your online presence. Make sure to complete your profile in full and to match it with the rest of your profiles and identity on the web. The background that you decide on is also very important. Try to use the same colours and logos as your personal or business website. You could also add more information on your background relating to your sites, products or services. Twiterimage.com and Twitpaper.com are two sites that can help you to develop a custom background.

Tweet like an expert on your field

Constantly tweet about information that is part of your expertise and people will start to follow you and rely on your information. In essence it is a shorter version of a blog and the same rules apply. Subscribe to blogs and feeds about your topic and tweet the most relevant links. If you already have a blog you can use Twitterfeed.com to syndicate your posts automatically.

Make use of applications to build your brand

There are thousands of applications available that you can use, some of them are more useful than others. The following applications can assist you with networking, pushing out your content and helping you to stay in touch with your industry:

Twellow.com - Find people in your industry to follow or connect with
Tweetmeme.com - Allows readers of your blog to retweet your posts
Twitter.grader.com - Shows the rank of your influence in your town, city, state or country
Tweetlater.com - Schedule tweets so that they are automatically published in the future

Twitter is an exciting and fun social media communication tool that can easily be used on mobile phones as well. With the rapid growth since its inception, it has become a very powerful social media optimization and marketing tool and should definitely be included in your search optimization strategy. Google has started to feature tweets on the search results pages and the rest of the search engines are sure to follow.