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There is a lot of buzz around Twitter these days, but if you aren’t looking to find out what your friend had for coffee this morning or what’s happening in the latest celebrity gossip, does Twitter have relevance for business? The answer is yes. But it takes a little digging to understand when and how to use this exploding social phenomenon as a tool to build your business.

Marketing has traditionally relied on push methods. Content was sent via direct mail, television advertisements, e-mail, and more. Regardless of the channel, the strategy was to push information in front of consumers, whether they were looking for the information or not.

Today, thanks to the Internet, marketing has become far more reliant on pull methods. Whether it’s news, politics, business or entertainment, people can pull the content they want, when they want it, so they are receiving only information of relevance to them when they are looking for it. For marketers, the goal is to get people to pull information on their products and services or, if the person is searching by topic, to make sure that their company’s products and services get in front of the user’s eyes. (Hence the importance of search engine optimization—SEO.)

One of the places Internet users are pulling information from is social networking sites. While many in the business community are still getting their minds around whether or not it is relevant to their business, social networking itself is exploding—and its influence over branding and word-of-mouth is growing.

In part, this growth in influence is being driven by skepticism about traditional media. Instead of relying on television, radio and publications, people are turning to word-of-mouth sources such as Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Digg and Facebook. Consumers may not see these sources as more objective, but they may see them as more “pure” in that they are the “real deal” and less influenced by corporate speak. They also provide information that is more diverse.

Twitter Basics

How are consumers getting information from these sources? They are looking at comments, blogs, trackbacks, feedback and other forms of user interaction. If you’ve read the reviews of a book on Amazon before buying, looked at the seller ratings on eBay, or clicked through a link on a blog post, you know just how powerful these peer influences can be. One of the most powerful these days is Twitter.

So what is Twitter? At its inception, Twitter started out as a content management system. Over time, it morphed into a mass messaging system of the most global and colossal kind. The premise of Twitter is simply to ask millions of people, “What are you doing?” then allow them to answer in 140 characters or less. The result is a free social messaging utility that allows millions of people to stay connected simultaneously. The power for marketing is nearly unlimited—if you can harness it.

Once you open a Twitter account, you can “follow” people that you choose. Once you log into your Twitter account, updates from everyone you are following are displayed to you in a list (like a giant RSS feed) in real time. You can then scan all of the “tweets,” as they are called, to stay updated with what people are posting and what they feel is important at that time. People can choose to follow you, as well. When they do, your tweets are displayed in their Twitter account, along with all of the tweets of everyone else that person is following.