The words we use in business and their meanings has been a topic that is bouncing around in my head of late. This is due in part to Tim Berry’s excellent post, the Five Words That Won’t Work in an Ad.

The fact is, if you are in business, there are certain words that you use that have great meaning to you but which your customers do not know and use. The danger is that you use those words to try to talk to your customers or prospects. If you do, they just won’t know what you are talking about.

This is an interesting topic that I need to explore more in depth. In the meantime, I have an idea about one way that you can weed out jargon that just doesn’t hit home with your prospects. This method uses Twitter. Don’t worry, you can use it even if you are as confused about Twitter as I was when I first signed up for an account. You don’t even need a Twitter account to do this, actually.

Pick a key phrase that you use in your business all of the time. It might be something inane, such as “forward positioning” or “goal reorganizing.” A phrase that I chose was “content writing.”

The goal here is to see if your phrase is used in the manner that you use it by your prospective customers. In other words, is your jargon part of their jargon?

What you need to do is go to http://search.twitter.com. Now, type your phrase in the search box and hit search. What you will find are real time results for your phrase as it is being used on Twitter. Twitter is a social media conversation tool where people talk about anything. It will give you a good idea about how your particular phrase is used and understood.

For my phrase, “content writing”, I was able to find out something rather interesting. Most people who use the phrase are people who are offering services, rather than people who are looking for services. That tells me that while the phrase is well-known in the industry, it is not necessarily the phrase that prospective customers are using. This happens a lot with industry jargon. You can adopt cool catchphrases all you want, but that doesn’t mean they will ever be used the the people that you are targeting.

In my case, I need to keep searching for the right phrase to connect with my ideal customers. Twitter Search will help me do this, as I return and search other phrases.

This method can help you refine how you talk to prospects. If you want to communicate clearly, you need to know what prospects will and will not understand. Using the right words is very important. Using the wrong ones can doom you.

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Bradford Shimp is the publisher of All Biz Answers. He is also the co-creator of Idea Anglers, a place to see your ideas come to life through collaboration. Follow Bradford on Twitter @bradfordshimp. Let Bradford help you with your business – visit BradfordShimp.com

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