Fifty-eight million people can’t be wrong. There are plenty of people who see the value in this social media platform, and they are casting votes with their personal and professional time. As a result, Twitter has become a robust marketing environment. Long seen as a consumer brand sector play, the potential of Twitter for promoting business solutions – including IT equipment, software and consulting – is quickly being realized.

The hard part, of course, is in figuring out how to harness it. As with corporate marketing blogging, the biggest mistake may be to wait for the perfect plan, but you don’t want to enter Twitter without marketing objectives or an idea of how to achieve them.

To help you plan your entry into this corner of the social media market, here are five reasons to start marketing via Twitter.

1. Volume: only a small fraction of Twitter’s 60 million users are relevant to your business … but a small fraction of 60 million can still be a lot. With the tools currently available for sifting through Twitter, it won’t take you long to find the pickets of activity that matter to you.

2. Growth: Twitter has 60 million users for now: the community is growing rapidly. Build your presence now, and you can benefit from a rising tide.

3. Chatter: having trouble getting a client or prospect to switch platform? Gain intelligence to bolster your case by monitoring Twitter activity. You can also use this as a way to identify new prospects and learn their pain points.

4. Discovery: use Twitter actively, and you make it easy for prospects to find you, effectively opting into the sales cycle. Isn’t that the point of all this marketing?

5. Relationships: active users often find it easier to get started via Twitter. Interact with specific users; don’t just broadcast. Before you know it, tweets will give way to e-mails, phone calls and face-to-face meetings.

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