Last year Twitter usage grew 422%. In February this year, it hit the frankly ridiculous growth rate of 1,382% according to Nielsen Online. There is some suggestion that growth has peaked further recently, but no matter which way you look at it, Twitter is huge.

Twitter has the ability to turn every day chatter into a must have marketing tool and invaluable source of intelligence for businesses, while engaging potential consumers in a way that seems to have become increasingly tricky for traditional media.

For many people, advertising has increasingly come to be seen as an irritating interruption. Consumers, once a captive audience, now fast-forward ads on their digital TVs, complain about pop-ups on the internet and treat emails from companies they are otherwise happy to do business with as spam.

With Twitter, you choose to hear from people and more importantly interact with people in a two-way dialogue. Companies, including Starbucks, already use Twitter to pump out their latest offers to those customers that sign up. Much of the mainstream media is using it to promote their content, offering links to articles in newspapers, magazines or promoting events and product launches.

There is simply no avoiding social media within your marketing plan and for those of you that are not Tweeting, you could be missing out on a great deal of business. Using Social Media tools as part of your marketing plan is a great cost effective method of communicating with your target audience.

Follow the team at NBG by following our Twitter updates.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 28th, 2009 at 14:59 and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.