Chris Brogan has a great post offering 50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business that's worth a read.

Chris has a lot of great ideas, but #29 on his list made my head tilt around 30 degrees and say, "huh?"

29. If someone says you’re using twitter wrong, forget it. It’s an opt out society. They can unfollow if they don’t like how you use it.

To me, this sounds like a big potential problem.

For example, let's assume you're in the business of selling some sort of high end product or service to businesses. If so, your target market is probably at or near the C-level with titles like CEO or CIO. If you told people at that level that they could keep up to date on your business using Twitter, they may find the idea very interesting. Now ask them how often they'd like to receive tweets from you with the following options:

a. 20+ times per day
b. 10-20 times per day
c. 2-9 times per day
d. Once per day
e. Only when you have something really valuable to say.

I'm guessing somewhere in the "d-e" range is probably going to be what you'll hear.

Now ask them what they'd like to hear about:

a. News regarding your products / services / company
b. News about your personal life

I'm leaning toward "a" on this one.

Of course, there are no clear-cut right or wrong answers here. The point is simply to illustrate that you need to think about who you're trying to communicate with and how they'd like to be communicated with before Twittering.

No matter what you say on Twitter, you'll probably be able to find an audience interested in hearing it. But is it the audience you want? That's what businesses should be asking.

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