Interviewed by Mercury FM Radio as a “Twitter Expert” before breakfast even! DJ particularly interested in how you can use Twitter for business, by building a following of customers and fans, then keep in touch with them via your mobile phone to update and make special offers.

Twitter is exploding after being discussed in front of 5 million viewers, by Stephen Fry (stephenfry on twitter) and Jonathan Ross (wossy on twitter) on Jonathan’s first show back after being suspended for the Jonathan / Russell Brand fiasco.

This has massive implications for restaurants and pubs, for example, who, if they are having a quiet night (and who isn’t in this January in official recession!) could simple Twitter their customers that they have a special offer of some kind on, and fill their business in minutes.

The other thing the media are missing about Twitter is that it can be used to integrate with all your other social networking sites, so your Twitter feed can update your website, blog, Facebook profile, MySpace profile….cutting down on your social networking workload massively.

Here is a link to some articles I’ve written about Twitter over the year or so I’ve been using it, on our Money Gym blog

CLICK HERE FOR ARTICLES >>>

From Wikipedia: Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service, that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length. Updates are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends (delivery to everyone being the default). Users can receive updates via the Twitter website, SMS, RSS, or email, or through applications such as TwitterMobile, Tweetie, Twinkle, TwitterFox, Twitterrific, Feedalizr, and Facebook. Four gateway numbers are currently available for SMS: short codes for the United States, Canada, and India, and a United Kingdom-based number for international use. Several third parties offer posting and receiving updates via email. Twitter had by one measure over 3 million accounts^[1] and, by another, well over 5 million visitors in September 2008, a fivefold increase in a month.^[2]

Some great free resources for using & enjoying Twitter are:

* Twitdeck – like Skype or Instant Messenger for Twitter and at a glance management of your Twitter account, keeps you updated with private replies, allows you to group your followers and manage them

* Tweetburner – is a very good tool to track how many people click a link you’ve shared on twitter. Very useful to see what your followers like!

* Tweet This – A plugin that adds a Twitter icon to every post and page, so your readers can share your blog entries on their Twitter accounts with ease.

* Twitter Badge – Official javascript codes that display badges showing what you are posting on Twitter.

* TwitThis is an easy way for people to send Twitter messages about your blog post or website. Visitors to your blog or site click on the TwitThis button or link, it takes the URL of the webpage and creates a shorter URL using TinyURL. They can send this short URL and web page to all of their friends on Twitter.

* Twitter Tools – This wordpress plugin creates an integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account. Pull your tweets into your blog and create new tweets on blog posts and from within WordPress.

* Twitterlocal – If you live in a particular area, and want to parse out a specific location, this Twitterlocal filter finds tweets based upon a users profile location. If you’ve a local business, this could become useful.

* Twitter Feed – Posts your blog updates to your twitter account. Login to twitterfeed using your OpenID, provide the URL for your blog RSS feed, and how often to post to Twitter.

* Tweetscan or Summize to see who’s talking about you, your brand, or a topic you’re interested in and make sense of conversations.

* Twitterverse – to find out what’s hot and what’s not, for example right this second Andy Murray is big on Twitter (why?) and over the weekend StephenFry was in the Top 10 topics on Twitter following Wossy’s show!

If you don’t know how to do any of this, or how to use all this to make more money for your business, I’d be happy to advise your business on all aspects of blogging, social networking and Twitter of course! Just visit my personal website at http://www.tinyurl.com/nicolamentoring or email me at nicola [at ] themoneygym.com (and don’t forget to confirm yourself through my spamfilter the first time).

And the man who can put it all together for you – and quickly too – is my partner Steve Watson – you can find Steve at http://www.SteveWatsonOnline.com

More info about Jonathan Ross’s show:

More than five million viewers tuned in to watch Jonathan Ross’s return to TV following his three-month suspension by the BBC, early figures show.

At its peak, 5.1m people saw the star interview Hollywood actor Tom Cruise on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross.

Ross’s last chat show in October before his suspension was watched by 3.74m.

Meanwhile, the star said it was “very nice to be back” as he returned to his Saturday morning Radio 2 show after the Andrew Sachs lewd phone call row.

Ross resumed hosting his BBC One chat show on Friday with the words: “So, where were we?” and apologised again for the incident.

He added: “Welcome to our millions of regular viewers and to our several thousand new viewers who I suspect may be watching for the very first time.”

More company info from Crunchbase:

Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams and launched in July 2006, is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to post their latest updates. An update is limited by 140 characters and can be posted through three methods: web form, text message, or instant message. The company has been busy adding features to the product like Gmail import and search. They recently launched a new site section called “Explore” for external and third party tools that interact with Twitter and a new visualization tool called Twitter Blocks.

The service was started by Obvious Corp, who also started Odeo.

In April 2008 Twitter launched Twitter Japan in partnership with Digital Garage.

READ MORE ABOUT THE TWITTER CO HERE >>>