Twittering has been around for a while now and it seems to me that there is as huge groundswell of popularity and third party tools. I'm not going to go on about what Twitter is as hopefully that's fairly obvious.

What I want to focus on is what should you be twittering about to create more traffic and interest in your brand? Otherwise you'll be spending a lot of wasted time on there.

You have around 140 characters at a time to tell people what you're up to at any given moment. When taking part in any kind of social media, I believe the focus of your strategy should always be to engage with people and provide quality information for them to consume. So use those 140 characters well.

Everyone will want to know and experience something different depending on who they follow. The common tactics though are:

- Share links to cool stuff that your followers will like. That way you'll get positive feedback in the form of replies, retweets, and direct messages. Sometimes link to your own posts, but mostly link to other related stuff.

- Engage people directly: ask questions, throw a statement out there, do anything you can to start a conversation.

- Send direct messages just to say hello or to thank someone. Direct messages bring you closer to your followers.

- Use tools to help you bring variety to your tweets, such as Utterli, TwitPic, or 12 Seconds. People love to look at pictures, and short audio clips and videos are not a prohibitive time investment.

As with all the advice and training on internet marketing, just go for it and see what happens.