The Service Cloud Twitter Demo by salesforce.com

Twitter is one of the fastest growing channels for customer service. The Service Cloud from salesforce.com lets companies join the conversation on Twitter, capture customer feedback, and share knowledge.

What Is Twitter? (And Why Do You Care?)

According to Wikipedia, "Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users' updates (known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length."

For the rest of us, think "Facebook Status", without the rest of Facebook. Twitter was founded in 2006, but until recently was strictly the domain of the digerati. Now the service has hit the mainstream, with famous users from Barack Obama to Ashton Kutcher.

Alot of people struggle to see the point of Twitter. Like all social networks, its tribal, so it really only works if there is a community of users built around it that you want to interact with. Contributing to this, Twitter has had slower adoption in Australia than in the US, where the service has been gaining momentum at a rapid pace. Depending on who you are and what you aim to achieve Twitter can be very powerful, it has introduced the phenomenon of instant search and users continue to invent new and innovative ways to put it to good use as per below:

Twitter In Plain English By Common Craft

Twitter In Use (@, #, RT)

Twitter does have some unique conventions, so here are 3 quick tips that will give you some Twitter cred:

• Firstly the use of the "@" symbol. If you see this symbol in front of a name (eg @jamiepride) then it typically means the message is directed towards a particular person, or is a reply to that person.
• Twitter can also be used as a search engine. If you see a "#" symbol in a post then it is a tag for a specific topic (eg #Apple). Posts on similar topics can then be searched by tag at search.twitter.com
• Lastly you may see "RT" used in a post. RT stands for "retweet", and it is essentially taking a post from somebody else and rebroadcasting it to your network. Its kind of like an email forward.

Apart from its use by the technically savvy, Twitter is starting to see some mainstream use. During the most recent bushfires in Victoria Australia, the Country Fire Authority used Twitter to update people on the status of the fires. On top of that many political figures have adopted Twitter as a platform for speaking to their constituents.

Evan Williams, Twitter Founder at TED

So, give Twitter a try and see if it works for you or your business. Like most things on the net, the cost to experiment is essentially zero. You can follow Velteo on Twitter here.