Can you explain how Twitter would work for a business?

Try this:

https://www.yammer.com/about/about

What type of business is it?

I have twitter set up on my business as well as for the animal charity organization I co-founded.

For the latter we use an automated feed to twitter from our blog. What it does is takes a blog post and tweets the title of the post and a tinyurl to lead back to the article. We then have twitter forward that same tweet to our facebook as well as our main web site and our myspace.

All this is automated and it drives traffic to our site and blog without any effort on my part.

For my business I have the blog automation to announce new paintings available and also I tweet what is on the easel and about animals I am painting and trying to find homes or sponsors for. Many of my collectors as well as the charities I am working with now tweet or facebook and have found me through tweets. I have made art sales from twitter.

For other businesses I follow some art supply stores and get coupons off twitter and also like to hear about new products.

The beauty of twitter is that in this fast paced world nobody has time to read paragraphs and the 140 character limit is perfect for direct and to the point communication.

Think of Twitter as another avenue by which your company can share press releases. Capture the point of the press release and provide a url to the full story in 140 characters or less.

Google has several Twitter accounts with which they convey messages around key products.

Twitter in conjunction with a blog is a great combination. Simply go about business as usual with your blog but write related tweets as you go. It is a great way to increase your reach online.

Starbucks and Threadless both use Twitter very effectively to market and promote their respective businesses. Firefox, Evernote and drop.io (amongst others that i use) also use Twitter to give updates about products, reviews and updates.

I think, esp. in the cases of Starbucks and Threadless, they “lift the veil” on the company, and produce a more one-on-one approach. is it still marketing? of course. but it’s friendlier than a “See our website” email.

There are plenty of case studies on businesses who have effectively used twitter to engage there target markets. If you are going to do it you need to have a strategy that will work for your company. The most important part is to have solid 2-way communication with your followers. Don’t just spout things to promote your business. Also, Twitter exclusive offers for your followers is a great way to use the service depending on your business.

Speaking directly to your question about improving your position on search engines:

The answer is no, Twitter will not affect your position.

Here’s why: links on Twitter have the rel=“nofollow” attribute, which means search engines don’t follow links on Twitter, so you could post 500 tweets (with links to your site) every day and Google wouldn’t care.

However… it could potentially be used to indirectly and negligibly affect rankings for a company blog or site, by having an embedded feed from your Twitter account on your blog or home page. What happens is when you post a tweet on Twitter, it also shows up as a couple of sentences of new content on your blog or site, within the little widget on that page. And fresh content is one of several hundred things that search engines like to see as evidence of a useful site in general terms. But this would only affect sites that were considered extremely high quality already, and crawled extremely frequently in the first place, otherwise if your site is only crawled once a month, tweeting all day long won’t accomplish anything because the crawlers aren’t already coming through enough to notice!

Anyway, forget about using Twitter to help your search rankings. There are dozens of important things you need to be doing for SEO, and this isn’t one of them.

(Now… as noted in the other comments, you could use Twitter (depending on your industry) as a general marketing tool. If your market hangs out on Twitter, and if you’ve got time to worry about it, having an account might be useful. It could refer people to your real site. It can allow feedback from clients or prospects in a casual setting. It can allow the fast spreading of bits of news and info. It can help establish your business as a leader in knowledge, innovation, or customer service. So to help rankings – no; to help with general marketing – perhaps.)

I suggest you go to Twitter.com and sign up a (personal) account, and start following some other companies to see how they do it. Among the ones I’d recommend you take a look at are @SouthwestAir (Southwest Airlines) and @DisneyParks (Walt Disney Parks & Resorts). They use Twitter for official announcements, contests, customer service, and in general just making people feel “good” about a company they might deal with.

Edit: @INGDirect is another good example.

Or follow this guy as an example as to how not to do it.

Thank you all for your help!

Dell’s twitter account made them $3m as of June.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=19696

Twitter just released a new section of their website called Twitter 101, which explains what Twitter is and how it can be used for businesses.

Check it out here: http://business.twitter.com/twitter101/