Twitter

foursquare allows users to share their location with friends by “checking in” to businesses via a smartphone application or by text message. When you sign up for foursquare and have the application on your mobile device you can physically walk into a brick and mortar store (hotel, restaurant, etc.) and an alert will notify friends that you are there, in real time, via Facebook or Twitter.

This evening I taught a session at the Rocky Mountain Micro Finance Institute (RMMFI) about creating a free or almost free presence on the Internet for small businesses. We discussed that there are many options for getting started that can help you put your shingle up on the Internet before you need to spend thousands on professional web presence. We also looked at tools that everyone should be using.

This month I have been horrible about blogging. Between client projects, trying to enjoy the summer, some time off and building the new DDM website blogging has not risen to the top of the list. This is not a good thing. Finding time to write even a short blog is important, because we can to keep readers coming back, Google coming back and just to be interesting.

Twitter is a micro-blogging tool designed to share short messages with people who follow another person. Users can share anything that they can say in 140 characters. Twitter can be an effective tool for sending out quick messages to clients, prospects, and friends. In this article I will look at some popular ways to use Twitter and show their value in business, I will also show some areas where Twitter does not work so well in a business environment.

Twitter is a tool that lets you share sort blasts of information over the Internet. These short blasts are called tweets. Some say that Twitter is social networking, I like to think of it more as blogging, and micro-blogging at that. When someone posts on Twitter it’s called a tweet, tweets can be up 150 characters and are just short updates.