The fact is, the Twitter user-base is still a tenth of the size of Facebook and the majority of users remain casual (if not dormant) Twitterers who’ve posted more Tweets than they have followers. Granted, if you’re in the media, marketing or PR, you’ll find millions of active users to follow and engage with, but what about those of us who work in more publicity shy, less showy industries and business sectors?

If, for example, you’re an Insurance Lawyer you’ll have a choice of 25 people to follow. That’s pretty lame as far as global communities go, but it’s a veritable thronging crowd compared to the connections available Bond Brokers. If you want to discuss the complex business of buying and selling bonds, you can choose to talk to David from Chicago or Jeffrey from Georgia. Good luck with that one.

Creative industries seem to be disproportionately well represented on Twitter. A quick search for “sculptors” produces 676 results and over 9,000 people have the word “printer” (or print) in their profiles. Evidently this (relatively) new medium offers fresh ground for innovators and explorers of ideas. As Copyblogger points out, highly creative people generally “have the courage to try new things and risk failure. Every big breakthrough starts as a harebrained idea.” And, rightly or wrongly, Twitter still falls into the “hair-brained idea” category for majority of business people.

Clearly, some perspective is needed here. One the one hand, many (probably most) industries are yet to populate the Twittersphere, but if the current growth of the service is maintained, that’s likely to happen in the next couple of years. On the other hand, there’s already huge value in finding and engaging with the press and media types in your industry, who you’re likely to find on Twitter today (in fact there are several lists to help you).  How else can you share snippets of news with influential journalists throughout the day without triggering a string of restraining orders?

In spite of my reservations, I still advise all of my clients to start using Twitter, simply so they understand social media at its most viral and get a feel for how communications are likely to develop. Anyone who thinks Twitter is not a business tool is hugely mistaken and likely to pay a heavy price within the next 2-3 years. Expect “meme” news and communication services to proliferate in the shadow of this little bird.

As always Neville Hobson was good value. He showed us an advert for a marketing role at Best Buy which stated “250 Twitter followers” as a desirable quality for the preferred candidate – giving evidence of the pervading influence of the medium. He also explained how the term “Social Business” is now emerging as a new media term, as opposed to something ethical or environmental.

So why are marketers turning to social media? Well, it’s more accountable (it can be monitored and measured). It involves direct contact with customers – so you learn about them, and they get to know you. Social media also works well in popular new mediums, such as video. It’s also fuelling customer expectations for personal recommendations and reviews – so if you’re not engaging on those terms you’re almost certainly losing customers. And, of course, apart from your time, it’s generally free. No other form of marketing can boast that.

As a result 34% of companies are engaging in social media marketing (Forrester Research) and certain industries are completely dominated by social media channels. In the tech industry, for example, most of the top news sources are blogs. Neville also pointed out that the 3rd fastest growing service online is still YouTube, asking the questions “Are you using it for marketing?”

I also found Katy Howell’s session interesting – as she explained how she takes a client from “trying” social media marketing, to actually benefiting from it. She highlighted the case of Primark – which has 178,000 friends on Facebook. Obviously that sounds fantastic… until you realise that they’ve never posted anything to these members. They’ve never actually communicated with them. Where’s the benefit of that?

Katy doesn’t stand for that nonsense. In the case of Baileys (the syrupy liqueur), a client of hers, her goal was to get people to drink it at times other than Christmas. First off she researched her target market, discovering (weirdly in my view) that some and like it hot and some like it cold. She then focused on identifying truly active and influential people – the ones who are prepared to DO something – inviting these groups to start exchanging hot and cold recipes. Now, the interesting thing was that lots of Baileys’ “followers” and “friends” actually dropped out, meaning their stats went down. But that didn’t matter, because the ones who DID something managed to increase sales dramatically enough to make everybody happy.

Other interesting points I picked up from the morning session included Eaon Pritchard’s comment that the average Amazon page has 16 different ways of providing or viewing peer-to-peer recommendations. He also provided the most excellent example of a small business using Twitter, in the form of @albionovens – a bakery in Shoreditch which tweets when its pastries are baked (I kid you not!). I also liked Eaon’s assertion that social media cannot work alone – to work properly it needs both offline interaction and to be adopted throughout an organisation.