http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/27/business/smallbusiness/27sbiz.html?ref=smallbusiness

Many businesses are struggling to make sense of Twitter, but even if it strikes you as an enigma or hype, consider this: many of your customers are already there.

Twitter has more than 100 million users and is becoming a free forum for business. Companies are using Twitter to engage in highly personalized interactions — sometimes right to the phones in our pockets. Twitter recently introduced a program of “promoted tweets” that will display ads in some search results, although this program remains limited to a select group of Twitter partners, including Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull and Sony Pictures. Eventually, Twitter plans to offer advertising more broadly, but until then small businesses can continue to make productive use of the service.