When a stalwart industrialist like Ratan Tata, with just 57 but powerful messages to the world does it on Twitter, it would be the penultimate call for Industry leaders who are, to a great extent, still ignoring the power of the web. Especially when these select few tweets get picked up and covered by the largest selling business news paper in the country – The Economic Times.

In fact, Tata, the article opines, has bypassed traditional communication channels to directly talk to the world. This is a huge move from the 143-year old and otherwise hard-walled Tata Group.

What this also states is the power of Twitter. Unlike an Anand Mahindra who has 534928 followers and 4078 tweets, Ratan Tata has 289307 followers and tweets occasionally. The point is who are the tweeple reading the tweets? And what is the multiplier effect that the tweet can have. This is because the tweets can be read by key influencers – the media, opinion makers, opinion seekers, brand ambassadors, consumer loyalists, researchers, bloggers, et al — who then carry it forward to the world.

The impact a Tweet can make can be much more powerful than the status updates a brand does on a Facebook.

If your brand has a face, that face can make one powerful Tweet that can be read and transformed into gigantic proportions. In fact it was the Indian Premier League (IPL) founder Lalit Modi’s Tweets that the media got wind of and replayed on print and TV over and over again. That’s what made Twitter popular in India.

You may well have 2000 followers on Twitter as opposed to 200,000 on Facebook, but there may be a powerful 20 in these 2000 who can explode your ROI positively.