Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you’ve heard of Twitter, although you’re probably wondering what on earth this “bird thing” is, right?

From Wikipedia, “Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers who are known as followers.”

Now, unless you’ve been using Twitter for a while, that probably means absolutely NOTHING to you right now!

So let me explain it in business terms, to give you an idea of why this is so powerful.  Let’s say I have a product or service that I want to promote to the world.

I would set up a Twitter account and find some people to follow (more on this in a moment), and after I have a decent number of followers (even before I had a decent number of followers I’d do this!), I would post a “Tweet” or message, mentioning my product or service, and will provide a link to my website.

I might even post a Tweet with a link back to my website with a hint or tip about my product or service.

Ok, so what’s a follower?  A follower is really just somebody who is subscribed to receive your Tweets as you post them.  That’s it! You can communicate with these followers individually (and they can communicate with you) by sending them messages.  More on this in another post I think.

So now you’re wondering how or where to find followers right?  There are people on Twitter with over a MILLION followers!  Others have none, and others have one or two.  So here’s how you add followers:

1. Post tweets regularly and make them relevant to your business!
2. Don’t “spam” people, so don’t always post a link.  Sometimes it’s better to just post something of interest about your industry and that’s it.
3. Find people to follow.  Many are set up to automatically follow you back if you follow them.
4. One easy way to find people to follow is to follow www.twitter.com/mrtweet/.  He will then send you a message, taking you to a website where you can find 200 people to follow!
5. Follow each of these (if you wish) and you will begin to notice, especially as you tweet regularly, that your list of followers grows.

And there you have it!  So create your free Twitter account, start posting tweets and see what a difference this will make to your website traffic!