Using social media as a marketing tool can enable small businesses to reach more customers. If planned properly, social media marketing can bring great success to your business.

But where do you start? In this brief introduction to Twitter, I'll show you a few services and tools that will help you manage and streamline your Twitter activity.

Twitter clients

Using the Twitter website to post your tweets and manage your account is fine, but there are other Twitter clients available that offer additional features that will help streamline your social media workflow. In most cases, a Twitter client has a desktop application you can use on your computer or laptop, and a mobile app for your smartphone. Some of the most popular Twitter clients are: TweetDeck, Seesmic, HootSuite, CoTweet, etc. In this article, I will be covering HootSuite, as it provides a set of features that best match my social media workflow requirements.

HootSuite offers the following features:

• Access and manage multiple social network accounts from one centralized place. For example, you can access your various social media streams from one application, as well as publish your posts across multiple social networks.
• Team workflow that can manage multiple contributors for 1 Twitter account. Each team member can be configured separately (username/password, different dashboard, etc.).
• Create customized views using specific filters, an hashtag for example, in order to display only the content you are interested in.
• Schedule tweets to be posted automatically later. This feature can also be used to save drafts of tweets to be posted later and can be used as a “tweet review queue”.
• Built-in URL shortener and statistic tracking. See the “URL Shortener” section below for more details.
• Free, web-based service. Like Twitter, HootSuite is web-based, accessible from anywhere as long as you have an Internet connection, and doesn’t require any desktop application to be installed. There is also a mobile app available for the iOS and Android platforms.

HootSuite works great for me, but you might have different needs that might be better fulfilled by another Twitter clients. Most of the Twitter clients are free, so make sure you try a few before you commit to one.

URL shorthener

A URL shortener will allow you to manage the 140-character limit in your Twitter post, by transforming something like “http://www.yourdomain.com/articles/very-long-article-title” (58 characters) to something like “http://bit.ly/123456” (20 characters). The service will also keep track of stats on these links (how many clicks, when, from where, etc.), so you can see which of your tweets are popular. The most popular URL shortener service is Bit.ly (free).

Find people to follow

Building your social graph within a social networking platform is important. Your social graph will reflect your interests, and help your potential audience understand what you are about. Ultimately, your social graph will help promote your social media efforts by making them more visible to a wider audience. Of course, Twitter has its own "who to follow" suggestions engine, but here are a few additional websites that will help find people you might want to follow, such as Google Follow Finder, and WeFollow.

Analytics

Unfortunately the analytics solution announced by Twitter in late 2010 is still not available to the public, so in the meantime you need to rely on third-party services to provide insights on your Twitter stats. There are a few services tailored specifically for large businesses, but usually in exchange of very expensive monthly fees.

Here are a few free services that will help you visualize your Twitter stats, as well as some paid solutions: TweetStats, Xefer Twitter Charts, ThinkUp, Klout, and Twitalyzer.

ThinkUp offers a little more than just Twitter stats. ThinkUp not only can connect to Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking platforms to provide relevant stats, but it also provide a backup solution for most of the popular platforms. For now, the service is only available as a self-hosted app, which means you need to install it on your own web server.

These simple tips should get you started. The easiest way to learn Twitter is by using it. Happy Tweeting!