According to a recent study published by Dr Nora Barnes, senior fellow and chair of the society for new communications research at the University of Massachusetts, more than a quarter of Fortune 500 firms have set up Twitter accounts.

Eric Mattson, chief executive officer of Financial Insite and co-author of the report, said: “The continued steady adoption of blogs and the explosive growth of Twitter among Fortune 500 companies demonstrate the growing importance of social media in the business world.”

This trend is echoed in the window industry, with the number of windows companies using Twitter rapidly increasing.

Insight Data’s Business Development Manager Justin Ball comments “many businesses are using social media to communicate with their target audience and the window industry is no exception. We regularly ‘tweet’ our latest news and it is great way of keeping our customers up-to-date with any new developments.”

While twitter may not be an obvious route to market for window companies, Justin Ball believes the growing presence of systems companies, fabricators and industry magazines using the medium is evidence this is beginning to change.

“Lots of people who have desk based jobs in the window industry are likely to visit social networking sites such as Twitter in their lunch-break. Some of these people are using this time to set up business accounts while others are simply following window industry companies using their personal accounts. This means there is a great opportunity to communicate with potential customers and prompt them to find out more about your company or visit your website. Exploring these less obvious routes to market can yield excellent results and we would encourage any of our customers looking to find new customers to embrace this new technology.”