Twitter is important for your business. It is not about regular Joe’s or Jane’s online popularity although it might be a indication of it. But it is mainly about how you make use of social media, how strong a personality you are online, and how well your business is making use of the web. Sure, twitter isn’t the only micro-blogging platform out there but it is still one of the most popular and influential. Books are written and e-books are published every single day about this medium. This article is about the reasons why writers can’t afford not being in tune with it either.

1)  Promotion. You have a blog and/or a website. Or maybe you have a website with a blog, or maybe you are running several blogs. Whatever your situation is, if you are writing, you need to have a Twitter account.

You also should personalize that Twitter account by providing a relevant & attractive background image, a full profile and relevant Tweets. If you don’t want to deal with tweets every time you post an article, there are tools for automating the process. However, you can’t neglect to reflect your persona, and your expertise on your Twitter profile. Like-minded people will follow you, retweet stuff that they enjoy, send you messages…In short, Twitter is a great medium to share your business, opinions, posts and passions with others.  The traffic (and the relationships) you acquire through Twitter are great perks.

2)  (Brand) Image. It is of course much more essential and practical to have relevant people (and/or companies in your list). But to the untrained eye, 2000 followers look better than 200. On a similar note, 20.000 followers look even better. Are there bloggers you like? Follow them. How about writers? Entertainers? If you are in advertising, following advertising blogs and companies is a good idea. Because more often than not, people follow you back. Not only you look more popular and important, but you also have a whole new medium to catch up with the events and industries you are in. Instead of skimming a whole website of news and ads, you will read tweets. You are not allowed to write more than 140 characters so you can choose to be informed about the most interesting stuff.

3)  Improving the ability to write better. As mentioned above, you have 140 characters you can use, including a link if you need to use one. Since you have such short space and an impatient audience, you are forced to write better in shorter forms. What better exercise is there?

4) Making connections without much effort. I told you needed to work to promote yourself, but the beauty of Twitter is that others are trying to socialize or get their names/brands out there as well. So people will start following you too. It is your call whether to follow them back or not, but it feels good that your list might end up growing even when you are not actively working on it.

Yes, a lot of people are using Twitter for unnecessarily insignificant updates about their lives. So? Don’t follow them. But don’t let your prejudice about twitter block your success.

I tweet @zoeyclark. What’s your Twitter handle? Share away in the comments.