Everyone has heard of the elevator pitch but who has two minutes these days? You also need to be able to explain your business idea online in a lot less time than that. So the latest version of the elevator pitch is the tweet pitch – the twitch!

So is it possible to explain a startup in 140 characters? Obviously you will have to cut right back to the bare bones of what makes your company different from the rest. And maybe it is that which makes this a worthwhile exercise. All too often startups spend way too much time filling up their communications with flowery language that looks good but fails to communicate the essence of what they do. Take a look through Crunchbase to see this in action. In a twitch, however, you don’t have that luxury, 140 littel characters, that’s it.

Here at f3fundit we have been giving it a go and it is not so easy. This is what we have come up with

f3fundit where investors and entrepreneurs help each other succeed. Competition for next top startup closes 21may, event 16,17june Barcelona

There, 140 characters exactly. OK, it isn’t punctuated so well and the clarity does drop off towards the end but it more or less gets across what we are about.

We tried it for some other well known businesses too

Google, suck people in with a great search engine, use profits from that to put everything online for free, take over the world, don’t be evil

Spotify, a complete music database streamed to your internet device with offline functionality, freemium with subsciption based & adverts

Can you do better? If you have already registered on f3fundit then look for the group called twitch and post your attempt there – maybe you can give some others some help with theirs too. If you aren’t registered then do – it only takes a second – and show us just how concise you can be!

The winner of the twitch contest will be featured one the site in a “Startup Saturday” article, be tweeted about via our own twitter account and be places in our monthly newsletter. So what are you waiting for 14o characters for a slice of free publicity.

Deadline: Sat 15th May, Noon GMT

BY F3FUNDIT

While twitter is nearly everywhere these days, many people still consider themselves naysayers. These individuals don’t really understand what the platform can do, most people will just assign a basic social network narcissistic assumption to twitter, and sure there are millions of people who use it for nothing more than to tell the uninterested world about the lack of a C in their alphabet soup, but what Twitter truly excels at s information distribution.

Simply look at the impact it had in Iran a month back, information was relayed in seconds across the globe, I think at one point in time a notable western news and media outlet just told people to head to twitter for updates and news, then look at the death of Michael Jackson, the first to know were twitterites and facebookers. It’s information gone global.

And what a business tool this little platform is coming out to be, at this month’s Drink Tank – I met an interesting fellow, Jason Barett from TwitJobs – a company that distributes job postings via twitter; effectively an internet company they’ve been profitable since day one, which assuming some of you who read this will understand is quite the task.

So what am I saying? This platform is turning out to become quite the business tool, from sharing information regarding links, benefits, contests, to anything that will grab the user’s attention, and if you’ve got your company, or are thinking about starting one, use it! It helps, it works, and most importantly it will bring you traffic, and make you money, so use it. But remember, like anything you can use it right, and use it wrong. So for a final sum up, here’s five tips on how to use twitter in the business world.

1. Make your followers want something, create a desire. Updates are useless.
2. Be constant, have something flowing naturally.
3. Provide interesting content, links, and services.
4. Monetize it. How? Google search it, but you can always sell ads via your twitter account as well
5. Don’t over do it. Twitter can be addicting, focus on your main business, unless of course your main business is twitter based, then focus on that.

And that’s that!