In yesterday’s blog, we began celebrating the sixth birthday of one of the world’s most popular social networking sites – Twitter. It’s hard to believe that just six years (and a couple of days) ago, Twitter didn’t even exist. Now with 100 million users worldwide – a number that is rapidly growing, mind you – it’s hard to imagine a world without Twitter.

So what’s the big deal about a site that only allows you to send out messages that are limited to 140 characters? Quite a lot, evidently. The Toronto Star‘s Alyshah Hasham released an article earlier this week detailing the many wonders of Twitter as it relates to the world of business.

A free source of advertising, Twitter allows companies to personally communicate with their customers. At Synergy, we proudly do just that by having our Twitter account updated each and every day with a link to a new blog. This helps to generate more traffic to our website and promo products catalogue. Of course, that’s not the only way that Twitter helps businesses.

As Hasham points out, the power of word of mouth promotion is made all the more stronger thanks to Twitter. If you get a positive review from a customer on Twitter, you’re pretty much guaranteed that the good word will spread like wildfire. The concept of replying and retweeting helps for messages to be passed on rapidly throughout the online world.

Interestingly, Twitter also helps for business owners to evaluate employees. As Hasham writes, “Being able to see a person’s tweets is a great resource for employers, though it does mean that job seeker’s have to be a monitor for their social media use, and remember that what goes online, stays online for the most part.”

Twitter also helps companies track the competition. It allows you to keep an eye on what your competitors are up to. After all, Twitter’s main purpose is for users to keep followers updated with what they are doing. How does your competition interact with its customers? Can you use this information to improve upon your customer relations?

Twitter, says Hasham, has also become a place where job seekers can go to in order to prepare for interviews. Candidates can follow other employees who work for the company to get an inside scoop on how things work there. They, of course, can openly communicate with would-be co-workers to get pointers, if necessary.

Twitter has undoubtedly changed the way that people of the world communicate with each other. In six short years, it has become a societal norm, providing us with such new terminologies as “hashtag”. The reference has become part of our speech for whenever people wish to underscore a particular topic of conversation or drive home a point. For example, #coolblog!