Twitter gurus from Downing Street and Woolworths discuss best practice

“You need to make sure you don’t fall into the traditional trap of social networking, just pushing out what you want to say, because that’s not very social. You need to listen to your customers on the web and make Twitter a two-way conversation,” Spindler said.

“Woolworths is not using the platform as a promotion tool to sell products like Dell has been doing. Instead, Twitter is used to break exclusive insider news and to engage with customers."

Dell reported last week that it it had earned $3m (£1.84m) in revenue through Twitter since 2007.

In other Twitter news, hedge fund managers have started monitoring Tweets for price-sensitive information, according to the US technology firm Streambase, which was tasked with developing the software to allow them to do so.

The technology enables traders to work from breaking news rather than waiting for it to be fed down through financial wires such as Reuters and Bloomberg.

It is clear that the business take-up of Twitter is now crucial to the site’s success, and is driving the firm to try to monitorise the traffic.

Nielsen Online recently reported that 62 per cent of Twitter users visit the site at work. Another research firm, Hitwise, revealed this week that UK Twitter traffic had increased 22-fold in the past year.

Just one year ago, in May 2008, Twitter ranked as the 969th most visited web site and the 84th most visited social network, but on Wednesday Hitwise said Twitter’s ranking had improved to the 38th most visited web site and the fifth most visited social network.