Twitter Creates a Guide Site for Businesses

Twitter isn't in any hurry to make any money, at least that's what the founders keep saying, but it does plan to earn some revenue this year. And the way that it's going to do that, at first at least, is from business-oriented services. So it makes sense that they've launched a new site, Twitter 101, aimed at providing businesses with a reliable source of information to understand and hopefully to get started using the service.

“Many are seeing a wide variety of businesses using Twitter in interesting ways to create value for customers and consumers. As a result, we're often invited by businesses and organizations to talk about Twitter and how it can be used to better engage with customers. Twitter is still a small team so it made more sense to do some research and make it widely available rather than personally visit businesses big and small,” Biz Stone, Twitter cofounder, wrote about the reasoning behind the site.

The site is pretty much as you'd expect – a beginner’s guide for businesses thinking about using Twitter. It starts with an overview of the service and how it is suited for businesses and a guide on how to set up an account. Nothing revolutionary here for anyone with even a brief experience with the site. Once you're done setting up the account you can move on to the “Learn the lingo” section, which gives an overview of the usual terms associated with the service, like followers, tweet, hashtag and the likes.

It gets a little more helpful from here with some 'best practices' advice, much of it common sense, but it should make it clearer for some what is acceptable and what isn't. Probably the most important information though is the case studies of businesses that have had success on Twitter, some even making money directly from the service, like Dell, JetBlue, Pepsi and others.

While anyone with some experience with Twitter won't find anything unexpected here, the site is bound to provide useful information to a lot of people and is a first step in providing a real business-oriented experience.