“Been there Tweeted that”, is the buzz these days and if there is news its first broken on Twitter. Following the horde of new comers to Twitter are CEOs, entrepreneurs and business heads, and by the looks of it they are here to stay!

For those business leaders not convinced about being on Twitter here is why you need to be present.

1. In Twitter, the ability to connect with your audience is unprecedented, and with a decent follower base (atleast 500) the opportunities for you and your business is immense. Now how do you let your discerning audience know you are on Twitter? Simple. Add it to the signature of your e-mail, print it in your business card, mention about it in public forums or in your speeches or maybe even get your PR department to announce your presence.
   Once you reach a critical mass of audience, the rest will follow and your follower base will grow considerably without much effort. Learn to be consistent with your updates and keeping it relevant; your audience is captive only so long as your content is interesting and you are regular. Take an effort to learn something new on Twitter and keep up with the trends – Twitter has a variety of features and tools that can be leveraged for your business.
2. Speak out to your end customers, and cut across all the flab and layers in between. Here is also the opportunity for you to be transparent, and earn brownie points in the process. But don’t be over zealous and risk leaking out company information and don’t end up with your foot in the mouth (Shashi Tharoor has unfortunately been at the receiving end because of some of his Tweets).
3. As a CEO, you are isolated from market realities so here is the opportunity to get to the pulse of your audience. Ask for feedback and get honest, unbiased responses from your Twitter followers. You could ask about anything – feedback about a new product or service, an advertisement that has been aired or even your new hairdo! Incidentally you could learn more about your customers’ preference, more valuable than any customer survey.

Here are some interesting business leaders to follow on Twitter.

Anand Mahindra – Vice Chairman of the Mahindra & Mahindra group, and arguably the most charismatic Indian business leader. His updates have been engaging so far, and he is also known to interact and take feedback from his followers.
http://twitter.com/anandmahindra

Richard Branson – Chairman of the multi billion $ Virgin group, one of the most recognizable and multi-faceted business leaders of our times. Expect a lot of colorful tweets in true Richard Branson style.
http://twitter.com/richardbranson

Guy Kawasaki - who was with Apple and later founded Garage Technology Ventures a venture capital firm and is a well known as the author of the best seller ‘The Art of the Start’. Currently, he is the Founder of Alltop a content aggregator and spends most of his time tweeting and marketing alltop.com. He has employed about 3 people to find interesting stuff and tweet on his behalf.
Interestingly, he tweets the same link 3 times a day because the first tweet gets him about 700 page views, the second time 500 page views and the third time 400 page views!
http://twitter.com/guykawasaki