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Last week I posted about Comic Relief’s Twit Relief campaign, which saw high profile tweeters auction off their ‘super follows’ for Comic Relief. The campaign raised over £285,000 with more than a hundred celebrities taking part and selling extras like a day out at the cricket or an evening of cocktails.

I spoke to several of the super tweeters taking part and was surprised to find out that they regularly interact with their followers and read a great number of tweets directed at them.

Duncan Bannatyne, another mega tweeter involved in the campaign, who regularly tweets to over 300,000 followers spoke to me about how small businesses can harness social media and what makes him tweet.��

A few days before his lot went for £845 the star of 91�ȱ�2’s Dragon’s Den told me he was more than happy with the amount he’d already raised.

“It’s a great amount of money that will do so much good for a fantastic cause.”

There had been concerns that Twit Relief might create a class divide, so I wondered whether there was a part of him that was in it for the celeb rivalry or just a bit of an ego trip? His tone made it clear he couldn’t care less about competition.

“Most certainly not, I don’t care about this for me. It’s not about beating other people, it’s simply about using Twitter to help raise money for charity.”

But with all the exposure he already gets I asked why he uses Twitter. “You get to interact with an awful lot of people,” he tells me. “It’s a great way of getting feedback on all sorts of things.”

Bannatyne’s tweeting habits go far to support his claims about wanting greater engagement with his followers. My first communication with the entrepreneur from Clydebank was six months ago. I wanted to get out of my gym membership and tweeted him hoping to get a pardon from above. It of course wasn’t granted, but he did reply, which came as a surprise considering his status in the Twittersphere.

Examining his tweeting habits more closely I’ve found that he regularly engages with his followers. Recent discussions have seen him give quite impassioned responses to issues such as bullying and you just have to look at the number of '@' comments to see how many people he tweets on a daily basis. So what sort of tweets is he likely to respond to?

“I prefer simple questions that require short or yes/no answers. I’m less likely to reply to a double-barrelled question.”

This explains why he answered my Twitter query. It wasn’t an interview, nor a rude interrogation, but a simple question that he could answer easily – and that I’d probably have asked had I been sat next to him on a train.

As a man who knows business, would he recommend social networking to small companies?

“As much as you absolutely have to keep up-to-date with technology and not fall behind, when it comes to social networking I don’t think businesses should focus all their attention on it. You can get a phenomenal reach and Twitter can give you an advantage, but I think it’s a small one.”

Both socially and in business, it’s important to remember the value of keeping things real and project who you are and what you do accurately. If you’re polite in person, don’t use the web to start being rude to people you don’t know.

If you run a business, make sure you know what you’re selling before you use social media to advertise it. We can’t expect the internet to do all the work for us and we shouldn’t hide behind it, but in our personal and professional lives it can help us unleash a huge amount of potential.