For newbies - read on

Twitter is a communication platform that can help businesses stay connected to their customers. As a business, you can use it to quickly share information with people interested in your company, gather real-time market intelligence and feedback, and build relationships with customers, partners and other people who care about your company.

• Tip: To listen in on the conversations happening right now, search Twitter for the name of your company, product or brand. Go to search.twitter.com.
• What are people saying? Some may post minor complaints or desired service features that they would never bother to contact you about—providing you with invaluable customer feedback that you can respond to right away or use for future planning. Still others may twitter about serious problems with your products or services — letting you offer customer service that can turn around a bad situation.

Twitter lets you write and read messages of up to 140 characters, including all punctuation and spaces. The messages are public and you decide what sort of messages you want to receive. In addition, you can send and receive Twitter messages, or tweets, equally well from your desktop or your mobile phone.

• SMS limits each message to 160 characters. Twitter takes that limit and reserves 20 characters for your username, leaving you 140 characters to play with.

When you combine messages that are quick to write, easy to read, public, controlled by the recipient and exchangeable anywhere, you’ve got a powerful, real-time way to communicate. And real-time communication is turning out to be ground-breaking for users and businesses alike.

One of Twitter’s key benefits is that it gives you the chance to communicate casually with customers on their terms, creating friendly relationships along the way—tough for corporations to do in most other mediums.

• Tip: If you’re new to Twitter and still wondering what all the fuss is about, hang around the site for a week or two and give it a few minutes a day. Twitter almost always delivers “Aha!” moments for people, but it can take some getting used to before you have your moment of enlightenment.
• Read more here: http://business.twitter.com/twitter101