When you read stories about how athletes and celebrities are using Twitter to communicate with their fan base, it's easy to dismiss the medium as purely social; having no application for businesses other than those where celebrities are hawking their products.
Twitter is a medium whose applications and usefulness are evolving in real time. In large part, it’s appeal is that it enables marketers to isolate particular bits of information and share it with individuals who have expressed an interest in having tweets pushed to them. Whether it's product related, industry news, educational, etc. the opportunity to spoon-feed content to people who want to receive it is groundbreaking.
Regardless of whether you ever plan to "tweet", or are active in other social media channels like Facebook or YouTube, now is the time to create a Twitter account and begin to follow some people / organizations (if you haven't already).
Follow competitors, others within your company or any person or organization that interest you. Discover how they are connecting with their followers. You will probably be impressed by the approach employed by some and turned off by the haphazard or offending tactics of others.
What matters, however is becoming functional with the 140 character playing field and figuring out how to begin leveraging it for your business.
Lastly, Twitter is rolling out the first iteration of their paid (advertising) platform which is called "Promoted Tweets". Just like advertising on Facebook, I believe it will present immediate opportunities to reach a highly targeted audience in a brand new manner.
