The official Twitter guide for business – complete with case studies, best practices and a free download

Twitter finally released an interactive guide to using Twitter for business. Twitter 101 includes best practices and case studies of how Dell, JetBlue, Etzy and NAKEDPizza use Twitter.

Twitter 101 is meant for business leaders who have struggled to understand how to utilize the site for marketing. And they’ve made it stupid-simple to use and share (the guide is downloadable to “help anyone interested in explaining the value of Twitter to businesses”)

Here’s a quick-n-dirty rundown of what’s included:

How Twitter works

This section explains the basics and even includes an actual search box in a section about using search.twitter.com:

Getting Started

This sections covers everything you need to know about setting up your profile, finding relevant people to follow, and of course how to answer the question, “What are you doing?”

Learning the Lingo

Did you know that some of the most useful conventions on Twitter—including retweets (RT), hashtags (#), and @username messages—were user innovations? This section covers all the basic terms. A good supplement to this chapter is “The Twitter Post Types: When And How To Use Them”.

Best Practices

This section is a “must read” covering the basics of what works and what doesn’t for creating relationships on Twitter. Provide value, use a casual tone, keep the self-promo to a minimum, and even a bit on ROI. They also include a few pointer to make sure you’re not spamming folks.

Case Studies

This section gives real life examples of businesses successfully using Twitter.How Etsy (@Etsy) builds value for it’s sellers by retweeting links to their goods. How JetBlue (@JetBlue) enhanced their brand by asking what their customers wanted. How JR. Cohen (@CoffeeGroundz) strengthened the bond with his customers – and started taking to-go orders via DM on Twitter.