Top UK firms slow on Twitter take-up

Twitter is seeing strong growth as a business tool

Twitter is rapidly gaining currency as a serious business tool, but a new report from Telewest Business suggests that employees at eight of the top 10 companies in the FTSE techMark 100 have not bought into the benefits of using the site for business communications.

This data follows figures released last week from market research firm Nielsen, which found that Twitter is the fastest growing social networking site, and that 62 per cent of Twitter users now login at work.

The US market has been quicker to give the service a go, according to the Telewest report, which noted that all of the top 10 technology companies on Nasdaq have employees using Twitter.

"There is no longer any excuse for not embracing social networks to share news, recruit employees, and even monitor and respond to users who are praising or criticising them," said Stephen Beynon, managing director of Telewest Business.

"The risk in not using Twitter is that these companies will fall behind their transatlantic competitors."

Twitter's growth as a business tool was boosted earlier this week with the news that Salesforce.com will allow its customers to track 'tweets' about their business using the firm's Service Cloud package.

Beynon pointed out that Twitter had been used successfully as a "network building tool" by companies such as Mozilla and Sun Microsystems.