You’ve probably been hearing about Twitter a lot lately. It has become the latest rage for keeping up to date on absolutely everything. While Twitter can be great for contacting friends or finding out about the latest gossip, it’s also an easy and effective way to build your business.

Twitter is a social networking site, much like Facebook or Myspace. Twitter allows you to “tweet” from your computer, phone, or other mobile device. Posts must be short. This allows you to keep your followers updated on everything that’s going on with you. Followers can be friends, relatives, or, the most important for you, current and potential customers.

To promote your business effectively with Twitter, you have to have followers. There’s really no point in tweeting if no one is reading it. Here are a few quick tips to gain followers:

Follow people, they’ll often reciprocate. Often it’s pretty easy to find someone in your field who you can follow. They may have a popular website, blog or newsletter and will post their Twitter ID (or you can search for them). Don’t stop there; Twitter allows you to not only find out what’s going on with them, but lets you see who they’re following and lets you become a follower as well. The beauty in this is that once someone sees that you’re following them, they’ll often follow you back. Just be sure not to follow too many people at first. Keep it close to the number of people that are following you.

Often people will do the same thing you did. They’ll find people they like and know of and see who they’re following. So simply by getting a few people to follow you, you’ll often build up more followers without doing anything.

If you want word about you to spread on Twitter, you need to make your tweets count. Sure, you want to link to your website when you have updates, but you also want to give them a reason for listening to you. Has someone published an awesome new product? Posted a helpful blog post? Is there a big sale going on? Pass this info on. If people know you’ve got good info to pass on, they’ll become your follower, and then hopefully your customer. Remember to choose wisely. If you’re constantly tweeting, people might stop following you.

Remind your current contacts that you’re on Twitter. Whether it’s a customer you do business with or someone you meet at a business seminar, pass on the fact that you’re on Twitter. When you tell them, you can also ask for their contact and become a follower yourself. This will remind them who you are and help them remember to follow you.

You might also want to take advantage of different software that works with Twitter. There are programs that automatically post tweets from your blogs, ones to keep you updated on the tweets of others, and countless others.

If used properly, Twitter can be a great way to build an audience and keep your relationship going with current contacts.