Twitter.com is nothing new – by now you’ve surely heard of it; however, it is about to make even bigger waves and virtually force itself into your online activities.

Both Bing and Google have signed deals w/ Twitter to enable real-time searches in the respective search engines for user’s “tweets”.  While Bing has released their demo search already (preview here: http://www.bing.com/twitter/), we have yet to see Google’s interpretation & use of the data.

For those of you who already know what Twitter is or use it, the rest of the post is probably not going to be very interesting, since it is primarily targeted at the people who aren’t familiar w/ it yet.

What is Twitter?
Twitter is essentially a blogging tool, but generally considered a “micro-blogging” tool because your blog posts (or “tweets”) are limited to 140 characters in total.  This really limits how much you can say, but has brought out a lot of creativity in people.  You wouldn’t believe how much someone can really communicate in such a short “tweet”.

Using Twitter
Twitter is essentially a social networking platform – in addition to the micro-blogging functionality.  You choose other Twitter users to follow (popular users are Ashton Kutcher, Shaquille O’Neal and Kim Kardashian).  When you follow a user, all their tweets will show up in your reader.  Tweets are organized sequentially by the time they were entered, so the latest tweets are always at the top of your reader.

Here is a real-time search of a trending topic (popular keywords being used in the tweets overall) for Windows 7, which was just released today:

A couple useful features to point out in the example above – shortcuts & common terminology for Twitter:

• RT or “Retweet” is essentially a re-posting of someone else’s original tweet (or their retweet even).  You can see several RT’s in the above example.
• Users on Twitter are typically linked via their icon/image on the left, as well as their profile name immediately to the right of the image.
• To reference/link to other users, you preceed their profile name with an “@” sign. So in the screenshot above, “@TBigMan” and “@tomrosenberg” are two additional users who were “retweeted” by “@rmx77″.  When you use someone’s username/profile name in your tweet, you’re essentially talking to them (or referencing them).
• Anytime someone references your username/profile name, you’ll be able to see it using a special pre-configured search in the sidebar.  You can literally see what others are saying about you (or your business, products & services) in real-time.  Imagine the customer service potential (& risks).
• Most links are automatically shortened if they are too long for the 140 characters, but in some cases, you can’t tweet if your link is too long. Services like http://bit.ly (think of it like a .com) allow you to provide your URL and then they give you a shorter version to use in your tweets. These types of services also provide ways to track how many times your link(s) were clicked too – very helpful for monitoring your efforts/success.

A couple words of wisdom for using Twitter:

• Don’t post too much or you’ll turn off your followers. (they will un-follow you)
• If someone follows you & they are tweeting like-minded info, it is customary to follow them back.  Use your own judgement though and follow those that you’re really interested in following (reading their tweets).
• Participate in conversations – don’t go there just to plug your products/service/ideas. Give & you’ll receive.
• Pick an icon or profile picture that is easily recognizable so that people scanning tweets in their reader can see yours.
• Customize your background if you’re tweeting for business purposes. Include contact information and/or other important links & info your “audience” might use to find you.
• Twitter can get addicting.  This is not a joke…. if you really start using it & tweeting back to people, you’ll find that you’re on the site quite frequently and monitoring others (way too much).

While Twitter may not survive forever, the user-base is quite extensive and it is an opportunity that most businesses and aspiring individuals should not ignore.  Even if you just start out by following others and monitoring the Twitter-stream (thru your reader), you’ll start to see how others are successfully using this social “tool”.

You can follow the author of this post on Twitter here @chowell18 and here @moreSEOtips