Should you Twitter your business?

I have long considered Twitter a complete waste of time -- both writing all those tweets and reading them. I am perhaps overly obsessed with how my cat spends his time, but I really don't care about the cats who live with my old friend from Boston (sorry, Manya). It's also much too public a medium -- everyone doesn't need to know that I'm a negligent gardener and the Cardinal Lobelia in my back yard is completely overshadowed by the the weeds (the subject of my first tweet).

But I've been reading a lot about how businesses are using social media (Twitter, FaceBook, and so forth) and I've started exploring how Evanston businesses are using these tools. It's been interesting.

Whole Foods tweets several times a day -- recipes or what's on special at the Whole Foods Market in downtown Evanston (but not, apparently, the one on Chicago and Greenleaf). Vogue Fabrics tweets daily as well, promoting new plaid fabrics or the new catalog. The goal of course is to get you into the store.

Lululemon Athletics, on the other hand, seems to be trying to establish a community among their customers with tweets about contests ("invent your own yoga pose") or blog posts about their products.

So, should you twitter?

Maybe. First, you need to know if your customers are on Twitter and will follow you there. Recent research reported by David Wilson indicates that lots of people try Twitter, but more than 60 percent fail to return the following month. The other interesting fact is that Twitter users skew a little older than you might expect: 25-54.

Second, do you have something new to say every day? As with all communications, your customers will read it if there's something in it for them. I get my hair cut at Art + Science and I want to know if there's a sale on the products I use. However, since that doesn't happen often, an email newsletter would be just as effective. On the other hand, if I liked to shop at second-hand stores, I'd follow stores like Thriftgeek or Crowded Closet to find out what cool new stuff they get every day.

Third, remember that regular tweeting takes time, and not just writing the tweet. It takes time away from whatever else you would have done instead. (I could have pulled five weeds in the time it took me to write about them on Twitter.) And if you need to have a landing page on the Web to provide more information about the tweet, that takes time as well.

I still think Twitter can be a time-waster, but I also think it's a potentially effective way to communicate with customers. I'm following it to see how well it works.