Twitter has been growing fast for the past three years, so it has finally moved from being a website that we loved to ignore to one that we just had to check out.First, I must confess that after just a single week Twitter has proven to be remarkably addictive, and possibly useful. So while it’s still very early days, here are our stats so far:

• we have 65 over 100 Followers
• are Following 135 165+ twits (is that the right term?) for a variety of reasons
• have Posted 9 updates
• and Received a dozen direct messages, half of which were from autoresponders.

I hasten to add that our intention was to start off very slowly and cautiously so, far from bragging about our progress, it’s actually a testament to how easy Twitter is to use that we’ve got anything to report at all.

Admittedly, as an online marketing professional, I’d been reading about Twitter for a while, however, equally, I’d never previously felt compelled to join.

Along with peer pressure, one reason for joining was the rumour that Twitter now has more traffic than Digg which, while almost certainly untrue, caught our attention anyway. (Sad, but true.)

So, while we cannot as yet vouch for the SEO benefits of Tweeting, we can attest to the fact that it’s a fast [read frantic], personable, mass communication platform with possibly the world’s liveliest community, partially due to the fact that no message (tweet) can be more than one sentence long.

Having joined, I received some pointers from my friend and social media expert Robert Grant (feel free to follow him) regarding which plugins to start with and how to use them to best effect.

Current additions include:

• Tweetdeck (based on Adobe Air) to organise tweets into manageable columns
• Twollo to locate and follow twits according to the phrases used
• Bit.ly shortens urls while providing usage statistics, and has a FireFox toolbar plugin too. (Thanks to Aliya Zaidi at Econsultancy for this one.)
• Budurl is a commercial alternative to Bit.ly that from $4 provides pretty analytics, which we’re not yet using but have our eye on.

Disclaimer: There are already so many different plugins for Twitter that opinions will invariably vary greatly as to the best for you to use. As such, you are encouraged to find your own favourites and report back here with your views. (Using the comment form below.)

Anyway, it’s early days so we haven’t tweeted much, as yet.

Twitter does appear to be a powerful communication platform, however, so we willl keep tweeting and see how it goes. If you’d like to be part of our social experiment feel free to follow us on Twitter here.

Update:

Econsultancy recently announced that they’ve created a Twitter api that shows every Tweet about them on the homepage of their website. Given that their traffic’s still down following their recent move to a new domain, is this a cunning ploy to get everybody Tweeting about them in earnest?

If so, it certainly worked! The temptation for self gratification has been too much for many people, oursleves included!

Click on the following picture to see me, like so many others, enjoying their few moments of fame atop Econsultancy’s homepage.