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There’s no doubt about it – Twitter is a phenomenon. It has absolutely taken the social networking world by storm and is currently the fastest growing social platform with a massive increase in visitors every single day. However the world is split between those that ‘get it’ and those that really don’t have a clue and wonder what all the fuss is about.

Usually, those that don’t understand what it is and what it does usually come up with some excuse about it being a complete waste of time and totally pointless. I’m being unfair – it’s not an excuse, it’s a very valid reaction to something that they don’t understand yet everyone else appears to think is a big as the second coming.

But what is it and why is it taking the world by storm?

Well, Twitter explains the concept quite well themselves – it’s simply ‘micro-blogging’ or a platform by which you can type a really small message (140 characters – yes, less than SMS!) and this gets sent out to all your ‘followers’ (the people that are watching what you say). That’s it.

So, a bunch of people have expressed an interest in the information I put out on Twitter every day. Essentially, my 140 character nuggets of wisdom are important enough for them to want to read them and so they ‘follow’ me. Every time I utter something, they read it.

That’s it.

It works in reverse too. I follow them, they say something, I see it in my ‘stream’ and if I like it, I can reply or ‘re-tweet’ it (essentially send it to all my followers).

Now, the answers to all the big questions are in that text above. The biggest question of all must be ‘how does this help me?’ and now I’ll provide the answer, it’s a humdinger.

Let’s say you are an accountant. You have 1000 followers on twitter and mostly you’ve been talking about the weather, the type of beer you like and the odd nugget of information about some odd accounts thing you do. But then you happen across something really interesting – you have some knowledge that will save people about 10% off their tax bill. You nonchalantly post this tidbit of information and suddenly people take notice. They also want to save the 10%.

One of your followers has 2000 followers of his own and he posts your information thinking it will be interesting to a lot more people. He’s right, suddenly they’re following you too. Your message has now reached up to 3000 people. What if some of those re-posted your information?

All well and good and you might get some extra followers but what you’re now doing is ‘networking’ and some of those followers will get in touch directly to say “can you save me that amount?” and you’ve got a customer.

So don’t dismiss Twitter, it is far more powerful than many people imagine and it’s really going to change the way we do business.

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