My favorite of company twitter usage is from Kogi (<a href="http://twitter.com/kogibbq" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.com/kogibbq</a>) - They use it to tell people where their Korean BBQ Taco trucks are around L.A.
I work for the Austin American-Statesman news company in central Texas.<p>This is how our Internet Editor answered that question <a href="http://thequig.wordpress.com/2008/09/23/op-ed-how-the-statesman-uses-twitter/" rel="nofollow">http://thequig.wordpress.com/2008/09/23/op-ed-how-the-states...</a><p>Here are the many twitter accounts our reporters use to distribute and collect news and information <a href="http://www.statesman.com/news/content/standing/twitter.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.statesman.com/news/content/standing/twitter.html</a><p>The team I work for wrote a tool to aggregate/retweet tweets from our staff and "widgets" to display them on various pages of our websites. This is mostly used during major events such as SXSW, elections, or Longhorn Football games as a fast way to collect and publish news and tidbits from our staff in the field. And also, of course, to engage/serve the Twitter community with news and information.<p>In general Twitter is a communications tool. If your business benefits from communicating with its customers (not all do) then it can benefit from Twitter.<p>But, like all things, it takes effort and can be done "wrong". It, like all things, is not a silver bullet.
Not really a company, but an open source project I contribute to (there's also an App Store app, so it <i>might</i> qualify as a company, I suppose) has a twitter account that we use. We mostly have a few twitter searches for anyone having problems with the app (Colloquy) or looking for an IRC client on a platform we support to recommend to them<i>. Occasionally we'll give out promo codes, either to bloggers or to anyone following us/twitter's public stream to use.<p></i>Note, for this, we don't use a bot — A. because traffic is low volume, only a few tweets every few days and B. (imo), bots that send send the same message to everyone regardless of what the query is, is obnoxious.
We've started posting announcements, conversation starters and small contests on our company twitter account (I've been doing it on my personal account a little longer).<p>It's still early, but I think it's a promising way to get the word out on stuff and start conversations. When we release new site designs or app features, it's another way (besides our blog) to get the word out.<p>Also, another strategy is to use the search feature and find people looking for product recommendations (this happens more than you think).<p>Search is also good for finding people who are frustrated with your customer service–or your competitor's.
I started to twitter a few weeks ago, and I was occasionaly posting links to promote my content, but when I check my google analytics, i hardly see any referal from twitter. So at the moment, i'm still unsure about how effective twitter is to my business.
The search makes it easy to see when users are having issues with my webapp.<p>Of course that assumes Twitter is working itself at the time... which sometimes it's not.
So I found this post on a new community site, and I'm honestly curious. I hear that companies HAVE to use it, that it is a GREAT way to talk with your clients and customers. But I've tried...and I don't get it.<p>You guys are a pretty tech savvy bunch - how do you use Twitter?