Twitter, a micro-blogging, social networking service, is a booming area for social media marketing. This service’s popularity continues to grow, and its ease of use makes it accessible to anyone, including companies with ideas, products, or services to promote. This guide shows how to get started using the Twitter service for marketing.

1. Signing up—go to Twitter.com and click on their “Sign Up Now” button on the home page. Then it is a simple matter of following the prompts and filling out information to create a Twitter profile, which is what other Twitter users see when they search on your user name.

2. Start following—this means subscribing to a Twitter user’s messages or “tweets,” which is a great way to get people to reciprocate by following you in return. You can find user profiles on the Twitter site or any site or blog that displays the Twitter logo whoshouldifollow.com searches Twitter profiles for people with similar interests. The profiles will have a “Follow” button you click to begin following their tweets.

3. Start posting—research has shown that Twitter followers usually continue to follow users who tweet often with relevant material. They also tend to retweet or forward those messages which have a high relevancy in popular topics, so it’s important for marketing to tweet well and frequently. With a limit of 140 characters, sending messages is an exercise in simplicity and brevity, not literary mastery.

4. Start chatting—Twitter is first and foremost a social network, so it’s important to connect with people who you follow and who are following you through real conversation and not just marketing announcements. Chatting is usually done by using the @ sign before the person’s username prior to the chat message. For example: @username loved your tweet on company X.

5. Gather market data—even without posting tweets, it’s possible for companies to gather consumer interest data by using Twitter’s search engine about relevant keywords, including company name, product, employees, etc.

6. Tweeting URLs—most companies have some website presence on the Internet or have relevant links to share. However, due to the 140 character limit for tweets, long URLs can take up too much space. There are sites on the Net like tinyurl.com or tweetburner.com that can shorten URLs for tweets and even track their traffic.

With millions of users actively participating in the network, Twitter is too rich a source of promotion potential for today’s businesses to ignore. With these simple guidelines, any individual or company can begin using Twitter for a successful marketing campaign.