The majority of LinkedIn members tweet, a lot of them quite frequently. That is what the results of a recent poll created by Debbie Weil have shown. Apart from 13 percent of users who see Twitter as a waste of time, the rest of them have Twitter accounts and 68% of all the 247 users that took the poll put it to good use.

Because LinkedIn polls do mix the replies with some other data on the members, you can see who tweets and how often by job title, company size, job function, gender and age.

Here are a few results I found interesting

• Company owners tweet more than others (VPs, managers and other types of personnel)
• Small companies and enterprises are big Twitter fans
• No Marketing or PR professionals see Twitter as a waste of time
• The male/female results are perfectly balanced!
• And speaking of young people not tweeting, everyone in the 18-24 age group is a proficient user.

If you’d like to view detailed results, click here. And if you’re on LinkedIn and would like to take the poll, please go here.

While businesses are rushing to adopt Twitter, some fail to plan ahead. They just get the account, because it’s trendy and someone told them it works. And then they start wondering about a purpose, about whose responsibility it is, about what they should expect. When thinking about giving Twitter a try, think of what you want to get in return, who can do the task best and what you’re going to give that you’re not already giving on different channels.

So if you decide your support team should have a Twitter account to monitor issues reported by customers on Twitter because you want to make sure their problems are solved and they’re still happy with your product or service, I’d call that a good plan. It’s not the same thing as tweeting back a link to your knowledge base or saying the same thing the email reply asking for more info said, is it? If your support guy playing with Twitter is nice, knowledgeable and doesn’t mind providing support for something that’s not really caused by your product/service, I call that brilliant

I also have an example: when I switched to GoDaddy, I ran into some issues and had to talk to the support team. I also sent out tweet saying my travel blog is not working, but GoDaddy support was helping me with it. The tweetsupport of GoDaddy offered to help, even with WordPress and database issues if I needed it. I didn’t, but knowing they were there for me for something that wasn’t their fault when they could have said it wasn’t a GoDaddy related issue made me love them forever.

In conclusion, Twitter is as good of a medium as any to broadcast. But actually connecting with people, listeining to them, understanding their problems and helping them solve those problems is the right way to go if you want to take your microblogging efforts to a higher level.