If you use Twitter to keep in touch with your friends, stop reading now.

This post is for people who are using Twitter as a marketing tool.

Start on the link above - go see what others are tweeting. Check out your competition. Sit there for a few minutes and watch the words go by.

Now think about your products and services. What words describe them? Are there some key acronyms? Does your Twitter name identify your company or product in some way? If not, create a professional Twitter presence, to separate business conversations from personal. If you have the time and skill to customize your Twitter page, do it, and do a nice job.

Learn about the various URL shorteners, so you can use them when appropriate. If you have SEO friendly URLs on your site, it may be better to tweet them directly, as they may have the keywords you need and they provide direct links.

Learn about # tags, which can be used to categorize your tweets.

Business tweets aren’t about you and what you do, they should attract people to the content you’re trying to share. You don’t always have to have a link, the idea is to inform and interest, to entice people to follow.

Examples

• I posted a video - Instead describe the video content. “Graphical view of system performance, tutorial video for VPS mgt software http://video.url“
• Going to event - Better to say what you’re bringing or looking for. “Presenting software doc tools at SWTX conference - 12 May 2010″
• New release, upgrade done - Again, describe what is being released or upgraded. “Version 1.8.8 of VPS mgt software - installed and running. Demo at http://bit.ly/435vv“
• Free offer - Be specific, so people understand whether it’s relevant to them. “Monitor your VPS - Free trial - http://site.com/free-trial“
• RT Cool post - Only your frequent followers and friends will pick this up. To attract new people, some description is required. “RT different perspective on VPS SLAs”
• Fun stuff - You should decide from the beginning if twitter will be fun, or serious. You could have a fun feed, and a serious feed.

Instead of considering your tweets as articles or microblog posts, think of them as headlines, or sound bites. Pack as much meaning into them as possible, if there is more information than you can tweet, blog it and announce the post in a tweet.