A few weeks ago I wrote a piece on the merits of Facebook as an e-marketing tool and suggested that a well branded page on Twitter could help small business get their message across.

Having spent the last few months on Twitter, I am not so sure of its relevance for SMEs.

It is important, of course, to follow the right businesses and, more importantly, to have the right people follow you so that the viral marketing effect is maximised.

There is a tendency for some businesses to post large numbers of Tweets per day and whilst this undoubtedly increases their profiles, it may become self defeating as it is easy to overlook them.

One Tweeter – who shall remain nameless – posted 12 tweets in a 15 minute interval and it was clear that there was no monitoring of the information being posted as it was being repeated on a regular basis. I have stopped following as a result.

It is also a very time consuming pastime and even using Tweetdeck, it is easy to lose site of the fact that we are in business to do invoiceable stuff. Being a busy fool does not pay the bills.

So if you are a small business with limited time what do you do? Easy, Blog, blog, blog.

I am probably as guilty as anyone at not blogging more regularly. Duncan Bannatyne, who is an avid Tweeter also has his own blog. The first he uses as a general chat, views on the world and a bit of personal promotion and the blog is much more business oriented.

That for me, sums up Twitter. It is a great place to have some fun but business promotion is more effective through use of regular blogs.

For a while it was thought that Twitter, Facebook etc had made blogging redundant. Quite the contrary, blogging is an even more important marketing tool and even if only updated once a month can and will do wonders for your business.