I had a chance to visit the twitter office in San Francisco to have lunch at their corporate cafe. This is a part of my “Corporate Cafes in Silicon Valley Blog“. And twitter was my 29th cafe to visit. The food was very interesting and good. This was the first time that I did not know what I was eating and had to take a picture of the plate under the each food on the table to record what I actually took.

Believe me, it tasted much better than it looks. And it is my photo shooting skill that made it look this way.

I had an opportunity to share the table with several twitter engineers and talk about how twitter suddenly became so popular in Japan.  Japan has the second biggest number of twitter user in the world and is one of the only country that twitter has more users than facebook.

Japanese people were ready to tweet as their main communication method has been e-mail sent from cell phone (not quite text messaging). So they were used to exchange short messages using mobile phones. But the emails were mainly sent to one person. Now with the twitter, they can share the message.

When I talk about twitter at my workshops, I always get this reaction:

I don’t understand twitter, I don’t have time and I am not interested in someone eating something or being somewhere at the moment. Why do they publicize such things that no one is interested to know? I got bored reading their tweets the minute I started twitter.

Well, that is the interesting part of twitter. The newbies tend to think that what they are getting from twitter is what others are getting. But that is wrong.

Your timeline is made from who you choose to follow. What your friend see is totally different from what you see. You do not have to follow any person that you do not want to see his/her tweets. Go ahead and remove anyone from your following list if you do not like their tweets. It is not offensive.  They don’t get a notice saying “John just removed you from his following list”.

Some people follow only their friends they know in person. Some people follow only celebrities. Some people follow news tweeted by bots (non-human program tweeting certain topics such as Weather updates).

And they all have their own expectations from twitter, the tweets they read.

Those people who uses twitter to be connected with their real world friends hates to receive business tweets.

Those people who uses twitter to receive latest information from anything they are interested in, do not mind receiving your business’s latest product news.

So, as long as they decide to follow you, its OK to tweet whatever you want. Because you are not disturbing anyone with unwanted tweets. They have a choice to un-follow you. But @mention someone who do not follow you to advertise your business is usually considered as a SPAM. They are many services that you can sign up and set up so that whenever someone tweets the  keyword you choose (such as “handyman”), it will automatically @mention the person and say “get free handyman estimate by visiting ***.com”.  It usually don’t work as the email blast don’t work. But a handwritten tweet like “Hi, I see you need someone to fix your leaking sink. We might be able to help. Please check our sink fix FAQ on our website: ***.com”.

So, twitter is no different from other online ads.  There is no quick, easy and automated advertisement that works. If you want to use twitter to advertise your business, you have to take time.

Other way to use twitter for your business is to connect with your existing customers. This is much easier and effective way to use twitter than advertising on twitter. You can tell your customer that you now have a twitter account to tweet some useful tips and occasional twitter-only discounts. If they are your customer, they will probably follow you. Try not to tweet too much. Keep your tweets informational. Now you have an easy way to communicate with your customers.