Twitter is all about communication. Nice, short digestible chunks that you can consume quickly and get on with your day. But you don’t have to just talk about your cat or tell us about the bus you’re waiting for.

Enhancing offline communication: Twitter at Conferences

One of the most common and useful ways of using Twitter for business communication is for conferences. Often, a conference will have a hashtag and then those present will be “micro reporting” the events. This means that if you aren’t at the event but know the hashtag, you can get some of the insights of being there. Very handy if you can’t get the boss to fund your travel to a good conference. Also, Twitter is used between participants who are present at a conference to help co-ordinate lunches/parties/after-parties/after-after-parties etc. Here are a few items on using Twitter to communicate at conferences:

• Chris Brogan talks about an insight he got from Radian6’s David Alston about how many conferences now have two simultaneous audiences: those present and those following via Twitter (and sometimes one person can be in both audiences).
• Using Twitter to Stay in Touch at Connect gives a nice little rundown plus one use for the technology: keeping in touch during conferences.
• Transparent Real Estate has more Twitter for Conferences information.

If you’re interested in conference use of Twitter specifically you might also enjoy reading an early post on this blog about getting the most out of conferences.

Amplifying your message: Twitter for Broadcasting

Then there’s Twitter for communicating between people in general. Both as a broadcast medium (“hey check out my new blog post”) and as a conversational medium (“Great to hear about your new gig! How’d you get it?”). Below are a few links about using Twitter for broadcast-style communication.

• One of the powerful social customs of the twitter community is the “retweet.” When you say something others find useful they will repeat it–increasing the reach of your message. Here are four tips to send links out via Twitter that help with retweeting.
• Once you get a group of people following your Twitter feed, perhaps Information Week’s suggestion for using it as a broadcast medium will be useful.
• Transparent RE puts forth a good summary of Twitter use for mainstream media as well as responding to some frequent complaints about Twitter.
• There are a variety of ways to automate your Twitter feed to broadcast blog posts etc. Brad Carol from Dakno provides a real world example of a point discussed by Jeff Turner at Blogger Connect NYC 2009: automation may not be so good for increasing your relevance with your audience.

If you think you might want to use Twitter primarily as a tool for communicating, try out the Twitter Tools for Communicating page. If you want to try something else, head to the Twitter for Trendwatching page or go to the main Twitter for Business page. Feel free to use the comments to let me know about other good articles about communicating with Twitter.