"Twitter is still a scary, untamed frontier for many businesses," Fortune wrote recently. We hear a similar refrain from the marketers who are part of the MarketingProfs community: They know that they should be engaging online, but they don't have the foggiest notion of how to do it, writes MarketingProfs Chief Content Officer Ann Handley in an article on Mashable.

"Lots of businesses on Twitter are doing it right," Handley writes. "But, lately, I've been finding inspiration less from those companies that have become the poster children for leveraging social media (this means you Comcast, and Zappos, and Dell) and more from the lesser-knowns: not just the little guys, but the littlest of the little guys. I'm talking about street food vendors."

A growing number of street vendors has been leveraging Twitter in innovative and interesting ways, serving up eight lessons for any business. For example:

• Less can be more. 1,000 followers who will actually do business with you are ultimately more valuable to your business than 100,000 less-engaged people.
• Create demand. Communicate the breadth and depth of your products or services on Twitter in a fresh, compelling way, and in a manner that speaks directly to your customers needs.
• Humanize a brand. Be real. Reveal a little bit about the people and personalities who run your business so that your customers can connect with you on a human level.
• Gather customer feedback. Treat your customers as resources for the kind of feedback that informs product development or other business improvements.

Done well, Twitter is plenty fulfilling for connecting customers with your business on an immediate and intimate level. But it's even more nourishing when you follow the eight ideas laid out here: "Tweetable Eats: What Street Vendors Can Teach Business about Twitter."