Twitter purists may label me a blasphemer but as a marketer I can’t ignore the market testing opportunities that twitter provides.

Obviously, you can use Twitter to listen to the conversations of your market - what’s hot, challenges, frustrations, excitement, and news.

I also use Twitter to test headlines and time-of-day for broadcasts.

Headlines: somewhere I read that the most responsive headlines are between 80-131 characters. Whether it’s true or not, it fits into Twitter’s fixed 140 character limit.

Using tweetburner you can create a redirect-tracking link for your webpages. The nice thing is that it tracks across all twitter aggregators, too.

Broadcast timing: I’ve also found that my market is active at their PC between 3pm and 6pm Pacific.

I tracked this by sending out the same tweet at varying times of day. The winner was always in that time frame.

Now I know when I should be sending my emails, too.

So, most definitely use Twitter to get involved with your market community but look beyond that and use it as a test bed. Besides, it couldn’t be any easier.