I've got a twitter account and I am ready to use it to grow our business. Could you give me a step by step explanation?

Hi Jooooooooan! (did I spell that right ?)

Click the link to read our blog post about how to use twitter for business.

My first advice would be to add a picture to your twitter account. It tells people that you are a real human being. There are so many spammers on twitter.

We got our first followers on Twitter via Twitter Search. We listened for our company name, our competitors' names and our products and started engaging in conversation with the people we found.

We tried to offer them information that they cared about, we didn't just make it a sales pitch.

That's some great advice, SageMother.

People often approach Twitter the wrong way: they try to answer the question: "what am I doing". No-one is interested in the fact that you had your 8th cup of coffee today.

Instead, answer the question: "What did I find that is interesting?". Make sure that your tweets are focused around a central topic(s), stuff that your audience is interested about, and lead them to interesting content, something that can improve their life and business.

You can use your twitter account to promote links to your blog posts, but don't just dump a link, ask for feedback, inspire communication. In fact, you don't have to promote anything at all: twitter is a communication platform. Ask questions. Twitter is great for getting advice and opinions.

Great stuff!

Another good way to create valuable relationships on twitter is retweeting other people's interesting tweets. As soloughlin says, keep it relevant to the topical interests of your followers.

Promoting others could lead to them promoting you, in that way, retweeting makes good business sense.