Too many tweets make a…

Complete the sentence. It’s what the prime minister did in the summer of 2009, in a live broadcast on Absolute Radio (to listen to the clip visit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3Mrfut-FSw), when he famously denounced the medium.

Fast-forward just over three years, and you’ll find @david_cameron and his team happily tweeting away.

He is one of a number of recent converts, which include a rather convoluted group of well-known people ranging from Hugh Grant (@hackedoffhugh) to the Pope (@pontifex).

There is an ever increasing awareness of the power of Twitter. The 140-character limit is the perfect prompt for brevity and can concentrate a point beautifully, in today’s sound byte society. There are also risks. An innocuous edit can distort or even misrepresent the point.

Is Twitter for everybody? Of course not: a company manufacturing bearings for nuclear reactors probably wouldn’t find that much value in tweeting. But it certainly isn’t a flash in the pan fad either. Much of Twitter has to be taken with a pinch of salt, but it would be insulting to the intelligence of the Twitterati at large, to say that they were not already cautious about the content they read and publish.

The key to successful tweeting, as with many more traditional forms of communications, is to keep the audience at the front of your mind. Relevant content can generate interaction with customers, stakeholders and prospects, whilst increasing brand awareness.