When I first stumbled on Twitter soon after it started up in 2006, I thought it was silly. Only the digerati used it-a bunch of kids who live on the Web-and there was no content for me.

But now you can find information on everything from aardvarks to xylophones. And there are applications that search the Twittersphere every 20 seconds to see what people are chirping about this very moment.

Should you care? As a financial advisor, do you need Twitter?

The answer is yes, you should care. You need to know about Twitter to network with other professionals, referral sources and thought leaders as well as to find new clients, serve as an intelligence source to your own clients and stay current with online marketing.

Twitter is a free social networking application. It enables you to send and read other users' updates, known as "tweets." A tweet can be no longer than 140 characters.

To put this brevity into perspective, consider that the paragraph above is 137 characters. Because tweets are so short, tweeting has also been called microblogging.

The notion that anything meaningful can be communicated in 140 characters has been satirized, perhaps most famously by Current TV's SuperNews! But Twitter is no joke; it is the Internet's biggest new thing.

Twitter is growing more than five times as fast as the second-fastest growing social networking site, according to Nielsen.com. In February 2009, Twitter had a user growth rate of 1,382%, while Zimbio had growth of 240%, followed by Facebook with growth of 228%. My sense is that Twitter's growth has actually accelerated since February. Rumors abound that it will be bought by Google.

Twitter and other social networking sites are revolutionary because unlike the telephone, e-mail, fax machines and other relatively new marketing and communication mediums, this one brings people with similar interests together. It allows you to broadcast ideas to hundreds or thousands of prospects, and it is incredibly easy to use.

But Twitter and other social networking tools do not have mystical powers. I've already heard from advisors who are making social networking the central part of their marketing effort, and some are likely to neglect more traditional marketing efforts to tweet and poke people all day. It's wise to remember, however, that social networking is only one of many marketing tools. Yes, it's fun, new and exciting. But most wealthy people are not there yet. They may be over the next couple of years, and you do want to get started now to be well-situated if promising new tools like this one are widely embraced by your most desirable clients. However, traditional marketing tools such as Web sites, newsletters and print brochures still play an important role in marketing your firm, and Twitter will not replace them or rid you of the need for them.

With that said, you can use Twitter to be exposed to new ideas, be more valuable to clients and attract new business. If you want to get new clients with Twitter or serve your current clients better, you'll need to know exactly who your target audience is and then tweet daily about the issues they care about. If you're always relaying to them the information they need to succeed, Twitter is likely to generate business for you.

One of the main ways a financial advisor can enhance his or her relationships is by offering information their clients can't get anywhere else. Professors are too busy teaching to do their own financial planning. Entrepreneurs are also too busy to cruise the information highway in search of the right route to success. You can gain the respect and trust of those professionals by tweeting about specific financial issues they need to know. Eventually, some will give you business.

Getting Started
Getting starting on Twitter takes only seconds. Simply go to Twitter.com and click "Get Started."

If you use Gmail, AOL or a few other popular portals, you will be able to find out which friends on those services are also already using Twitter. The site then suggests some famous people you might want to meet. No need to bother with that now, however.

The first thing to do-even before you try to locate your friends or prospects-is set up your Twitter home screen. Click on "Settings" to set up your time zone and other important information, including your firm's Web site URL and your bio. This information is important. Be sure your brief bio contains keywords that describe your business focus. If your target clients are "chiropractors" or "executives at Florida Power & Light," then use those phrases and words in your bio.

After that, click on the submenu in the setting for "picture" to upload your photo. Choose a picture with a close-up of just your face that shows you smiling. If you need to crop your photo or do other editing, there's an easy, free picture editor at www.drpic.com.

Next, spruce up your Twitter page by clicking on "design" and selecting a background graphic. If you want to get fancy, a bevy of sites allow you to customize your background. For instance, you can create backgrounds at www.twitterbacks.com/ or www.mytweetspace.com.

Finding Followers
To generate business on Twitter you want to target hundreds or even thousands of people in your niches. Start with people you know. Again, your contacts in Gmail, AOL and Yahoo! can be exported into Twitter so you can look up their Twitter screen names. However, most advisors use Outlook, Act! or some other customer relationship management software, and these people will have to take an extra step or two to export e-mail addresses to Twitter. One option is to export your contact list to an Excel file and upload it to a Gmail, Hotmail, AOL or Yahoo! account. Alternatively, you can simply cut and paste a comma-separated list of e-mail addresses into Twitter-just click on the "Find People" tab to get started.

You can also post your Twitter ID on your blog, like I did (gluck.advisorblogcentral.com), and place this ID at the bottom of all e-mails in your "signature." This makes it easy for people to follow you.

To find prospects, use some of the many new Twitter-related applications that have cropped up in recent months. Because Twitter has published an easy-to-use application programming interface (API), free applications have sprouted up faster than they can be tracked. The best list of Twitter applications I've come across is at www.squidoo.com/twitterapps.

There are also search engines that allow you to comb the Twittersphere, which can be a good way to find people you want to follow yourself. By using a Twitter search engine to find people within your target market-both in your geographic area and in your area of specialty-you can turn social networking into a prospecting machine.

Twitter's own search tool is helpful (search.Twitter.com). Also try TweetBeep, which sends you e-mail alerts about topics you want to know about or that your target prospects are likely to be talking about. A promising new site is Twellow (www.twellow.com), which calls itself the Twitter Yellow Pages.

Say you are an advisor in San Francisco and work mainly with college professors. You can use an advanced search tool to search for tweets using the term "professor" within a 20-mile radius of San Francisco. Look at the tweets that are returned from your search and follow the professors you find. If you have been tweeting about financial planning for professors, the professors that you have followed will check out what you are tweeting.

Keep in mind that when you follow a professor, you can see all his tweets. Since professors tend to socialize with one another, you may scour his tweets and find other professors to communicate with. An excellent tool that can do this for you is Twubble (www.crazybob.org/twubble). Another good tool is Twollow (www.twollow.com), which can allow you to automatically follow people who use keywords you define.

Some important ground rules to be aware of on Twitter: When you use a Twitter search engine to find people to follow, many of them will follow you in return. Good social networking etiquette means that you should follow most people who follow you. But you don't have to follow all of them. When someone follows you, you receive an e-mail alerting you with their Twitter name. It's wise to click on the name and look at the last 20 or 30 tweets made by this person. If they are not valuable, don't follow them.

You do risk that the person will stop following you if you do not follow him. Many automatic tools, such as Twitter Karma (www.dossy.org/twitter/karma/), Less Friends (www.lessfriends.com) and Qwitter (www.useqwitter.com) will tell you who has "unfollowed" you.

Creating Content
The way to make people follow you on Twitter now that you've set it up is by offering good content, and what's even better is if you can find an automated way to create it.

Here's one three-step process I came up with: First, create a free Google account and enter a topic on the Google Alerts page with keywords you want to track. If you set up an alert for "Autodesk," for example, Google will automatically tell you when that term is used. You can then use the Google Alerts dashboard to turn the alert into an RSS feed, which will create a unique URL for the feed. Next, you can shorten this URL, which is critical for Twitter's strict 140-character limits, by opening up a free account on bit.ly (www.bitly.com), a Web site integrated with Twitter that condenses long addresses. Lastly, take the shortened URL for your Google feed and create a free account at Twitterfeed (www.twitterfeed.com), which will automatically feed your Google search on Autodesk into Twitter. When you set up your feed, be sure to set Twitterfeed to include only the title information from your RSS feed. Whenever your search term appears with new content, it will automatically create a tweet about it. If you go back to bit.ly to check on your short URLs, you can see statistics about how many people have clicked on it.

Compliance issues are a major concern in using Twitter, and many B-Ds simply won't allow their reps to use it. However, B-Ds will not object to reps sending links automatically using the system I've described here. For more about compliance issues and social networking, you can see a replay of a Webinar about social networking tools and advisor compliance at
www.bitly.com/c5yi9. And be on the lookout for compliance-friendly Twitter tools because they are bound to be created by thoughtful technology companies serving advisors.

New techniques for Twitter are popping up daily. Check my blog at gluck.advisorblogcentral.com for updates and register for my May 8 Webinar, "Twitter For Advisors," at www.bitly.com/12FCRX.

Andrew Gluck, a longtime writer and journalist, is CEO of Advisor Products Inc. (www.advisorproducts.com ), a Westbury, N.Y., marketing company serving 1,800 advisory firms.