Relationships are so important to build when using social networking. If you’re looking for a way to help you streamline your outreach efforts, Twitter can help you do just that. As an easy to use networking tool, you can easily keep in touch with your clients and other audience members by sending them bits of news information.

Wondering if you can actually use something like Twitter? Twitter has a 140 character maximum per message. Even with this short amount of text, companies like The New York Times, CNN, the Orlando (Fla.) Sentinel and The (Portland) Oregonian are using Twitter to send news updates via cell phone text messages or via instant messaging.

What’s also interesting to see is how other businesses are beginning to take advantage of “micro-blogging” that Twitter can provide. It’s amazing to see even the journalism industry find ways to report late breaking news stories and keep them up to date. It’s also interesting to know that the Los Angeles Fire Department has it’s own Twitter page to update journalists. Instead of listening to a scanner, they can get updated via this site.

With all this talk about how other businesses and companies are using Twitter, what’s more important here is finding ways for you to use Twitter in your everyday communication with your audience. While you might not have late breaking news to report to your audience everyday, you can still do some consistent follow up with the hopes of it becoming a two-way communication. Here are some ideas of how you can use Twitter in your relationship building.

1. Send news updates about your business, product or service.
2. Send promotional sales event information.
3. Have an interactive contest to encourage two-way communication.
4. Remember an audience member’s birthday.
5. Encourage interaction between audience members.

The concept of micro-blogging is catching on rather quickly. Considering the popularity with text messaging already in the phone industry, it would follow that using a social application like Twitter will only enhance text messaging efforts. Looking for just another way to make your iPhone even more useful? Add Twitter and find out how you can make use of micro-blogging.

Twitter is a great resource to help you maintain your connection with your audience. What’s interesting to note is that while your “tweets” might start out being a one-way type of communication, you can eventually turn that into a two-way communication with the possibility of encouraging communication between audience members. This can take your relationship building efforts really far!