Use Twitter for business…. does that sound crazy? Maybe, maybe not. You may be surprised to note the possibilities of using Twitter – and the benefits.

Firstly, for those not familiar with the service – it is a social network limited to short, 140-character text messages. While it may seem like a waste, consider the following:

Due to the short message length, the conversation goes extremely fast – hence the name. As such, with no long conversations, it is possible to connect with a good number of people in a short space of time.

As such, it does not take up much time to engage in it – in just ten to fifteen minutes a day, you can do all the tweeting you need to do to have a “physical” presence for your business on Twitter.

Due to the fact that people easily follow one another, it is easy to build up a large following in a short space of time – making for some easy exposure whenever you want or need it.

Lastly – it is a reasonably responsive medium – with marketers reporting direct response rates of up to 5%. Now while that does not seem like much, keep in mind that it is relatively simple to gather a following of a few thousand on Twitter – so that 5% can quickly add up to reasonable numbers.

There are already a number of big corporations using twitter to communicate with clients, and to allow clients to contact them – with great success. Companies are also paying users with reasonable follower numbers to tweet their marketing messages.

In short:

It is easy and simple to use.

It can bring you visitors.

It is free to use.

It is not time consuming.

It allows for customer interaction.

It is a great branding tool.

Bottom line:

If you do not use Twitter for business, you may very well be passing by on a great resource. Can you afford to do that?