Many sites promise to teach the "art" of using Twitter to achieve more sales and business contacts, but few offer practical solutions on how to actually get down to the job and do it. It's like when our children begin with their first "little girlfriends" and don’t have the faintest idea on how to interact with the female gender. With metaphorical words or tangential descriptions they generally end up more confused than before. They want a trick to sweep girls off their feet. And who uses Twitter to do business, wants the same. But is not that simple. I won’t lie.

Twitter, like other social networks, requires time and investment. Everybody mentions how Dell achieved via Twitter over six and a half million in sales last year. But this just not happened by opening an account. Dell’s strategic communications division has more than one hundred employees devoted only to this sales channel. Therefore, the ultimate reality comes true again "to make money, you should invest money."

If you aspire to develop and maintain this channel, you must take it as another activity of your company, and give it the importance it deserves. It tends to be milsleading the simplicity and personal use that is given to Twitter, and it generates the idea that "with a couple of tweets per day it’s done". To tweet to generate business is not something you can do while commuting to work each day or during lunch. We need a plan, to spend time with this plan and to follow it faithfully.

Get a schedule. Open Twitter every day, at the same time –if nothing unexpected arises- and do this:

Step Nº 1: Follow who you find interesting. If you have few followers, this is what you should do. Follow who you think can offer interesting material, the "gurus" of your business, your competitors, other industries and related professionals.

Step Nº 2: Research your keywords on Twitter. At this point, don’t do anything else. First, we must learn what is said in our business. Learn about latest trends and what people look at these times. Not all businesses, but some have large seasonal fluctuations in terms of demand for products and services.

Step Nº 3: Imagine you are a child and your parents change you to another school in the middle of school year. School year has started, and during the breaks you are all alone. What’s natural? Introduce yourself. Until now, the words "sell", "promote", "super discount" and all related are taboo. You will have time to sell later on, but firstly you must find who to sell to.

Step Nº4: Offer solutions. Imagine if someone comes up with a question, or needs information about your niche-products, services, etc.. Offer them open heartedly. Please don’t ever close your tweets with something like "Visit our website and find exactly what you want". Anyway, the number of characters is not enough to do so. Remember that only 140 are allowed. Imagine yourself in school break in the situation described above. You see a group of children playing football. You approach them and ask: "Can I play?" You surely woudn’t even consider saying "If you let me play I’ll invite you home because I have a Play Station III". Forget about what you have in your house and play. Enjoy the moment.

Too much for the first day. We will continue our strategic plan to do business on Twitter in next posting. Now have a cup of chocolate milk and some cookies, and have a good time.