You may be wondering why something as seemingly simple as Twitter causes so much confusion and consternation among business people. 

Perhaps, it best likened to a tool like a hammer which is simultaneously simple and powerful.  After all, a hammer can be used to put up a basic bookshelf or to build an entire home that will house a family for a lifetime.

Everything depends on whether you wield that hammer in an awkward, solitary way or use it skillfully and cooperatively with a team of other like-minded folks.  So too with Twitter.   Used poorly, you may do little more than smash your virtual thumb.  But, if you use it well, you can make a measurable difference in your content marketing strategy.  Happily, some terrific tools make the effective use of Twitter almost as easy as hammering in a nail.

(If you are brand new to Twitter, you may want to read our earlier post, Twitter for Business Made Easy , before continuing)

Here are six easy ways for Twitter to strengthen your content marketing efforts:

1. Share your best thinking concisely to deliver quick, obvious value.  Those of us who spend a lot of time blogging, crank out hundreds of words to share our our knowledge on the topics with which we are most engaged. That’s good and important.  But a pithy, 140 character tweet can also convey a thought precisely and can then resonate through retweets across the twittersphere.  That can make for accelerated thought leadership.
2. Monitor and interact with conversations that take place within your niche markets. Because effective content marketing is as much about conversation as it is an outbound messages, you need to maintain a dialogue with customers, prospects, and industry thought leaders.  By using tools such as TweetGrid and TweetDeck, you can watch in real time what is being said so that you can respond and add value to the conversation.
3. Follow and familiarize yourself with critical trends in your market.  Because it is so hard to stay current, we need all the help we can get.  Twitter is an ideal tool for following those trends in real time.  In fact, its website has been redesigned to focus on showing obvious trends. You can also use Twitter Search and another helpful tool, Monitter to see what’s happening right now in topic areas that are really important to you.
4. Create interest groups for others who are passionate about issues that resonate with your customers and prospects.  Within these groups, you can focus on only those issues that are most pressing for group members.  One tool that Doriano Carta of Mashable recommends is tweetworks because it enables you to set up ad hoc groups on the fly.
5. Extend the reach of your blog posts onto Twitter automatically. We all want to reach as many people as possible with the writing we do on our blogs.  As we increase our use of Twitter, we will develop hundreds and perhaps thousands of followers to whom we may offer instant access to our blog posts.  A great tool called, twitterfeed,  then seamlessly pulls your latest blog post on to Twitter.

Plenty of industry pundits consider Twitter just a fad. But, I’m pretty well convinced that, for content marketers, it’s a tool that may be as useful and long-lasting as your trusty hammer.