Firstly, Twitter is a social networking tool. It’s about following people you are interested in, and in turn it’s about people who are interested in you following what you have to say. There is often an impulse to automatically follow anybody who follows you, but be selective about this. There is a bit of a backlash now against those who follow people purely to get them to follow back, so think for a second before you do this. There is no point in having 500 irrelevant followers, better to have 10 useful ones!

Next, get involved with your network. Ask questions, post answers, provide links to content they may find useful, be an asset to them so that when they come to clear out those they no longer wish to follow you are not on that list.

Be careful of how many tweets you post at once. There is nothing worse than blasting out a dozen tweets within a 30 second timeframe. This hogs your followers Twitter feeds and is the quickest way to get you unfollowed.

Complete your bio info on your Tweeter profile. If somebody decided that they may like to follow you then they’ll want to know a little about you and where you are based before they do. Provide this to them or you risk losing them.

Do more than promote your own agenda. Users who purely self promote won’t be followed for long. Of course self promotion is really what most users are after, but be sensible about this. Try and write a mixture of posts, some of which may refer to your site or blog, but others which comment on someone else’s blog, a news article or other item of interest.

To quickly summarise, I’ve found that the real benefits of Twitter come from being involved with the people you are following and the people following you. It’s not just about advertising your product to as many people as possible, it’s about becoming actively involved with them, engaging with them and benefiting from their experience in their field.

If you’re a business, and you’re not yet tweeting then you’re missing a trick. Get involved, sign up for an account and get following. Visit http://www.twitter.com to get started.