Twitter Ethics for Business

Social media, once the domain of personal profiles and peer-based social networking, is becoming increasingly standard for business promotion. By joining the MySpaces, Facebooks and Twitters of the social media community, some companies are finding customer bases that would have been hard to come by through other means; some even encourage employees to post and tweet throughout the work day with people the business would like to know. As employees use their personal profiles to tout company and client work, transparency about whom one is working for becomes vital.

Twitter Basics

Twitter, known for its bite-sized post limit, is a great search engine for people with similar interests. Users write short narratives about what they are working on, what they had for lunch and anything else they want the world to hear. A site where people openly reveal their likes, dislikes and tastes seems a ripe environment for word of mouth marketing, but persons who do not disclose their company connections can do more damage than good for the business.