For an ecommerce website Twitter can be a great way to reach out to customers. It can be used for help and support, promotions and general brand awareness. While some online shops have embraced tweeting, others have just dipped their toes in or ignored it altogether. So, which of the top 50 online retailers in the UK are the most successful twitterers?

The table below uses the live feeds from Twitter.com and shows the accounts from those in the top 50 ordered by the most fundamental metric of success on Twitter; number of followers:

It is significant that while lots of businesses have realised the power of tweeting, several big players, including PC World and Apple, do not even try. Dell, by contrast, has a whole family of Twitter accounts. Signing up to Twitter is one thing, but committing the resources to fully harness the potential of the medium can be quite another thing altogether.

Some websites, such as John Lewis, clearly promote all their social media accounts on their homepage. Others, such as IKEA, do have a presence, but you have to go looking for them. Surprisingly few companies have bothered with verifying their account. Further analytics, such as frequency of tweets and Twitter clients used, can be found at TweepStats.com.

It is also worth noting that there are many very active accounts run by companies not in the top 50 UK online retailers, such as @VodafoneUK, @ocadouk and @PizzaExpress.