Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos was an early personal investor in Twitter. So how is his company using the popular microblogging service? Amazon, like other big companies, is experimenting with Twitter to get the word out about deals and services. But Amazon hasn't fully embraced the social networking power of Twitter.

Amazon at the moment appears to be getting the most Twitter traction with amazonmp3, which highlights Amazon digital music offerings and has attracted more than 13,000 followers. Two other accounts, tracking Amazon deals and games, also boast large followings, and Amazon recently made some new forays on Twitter with accounts devoted to its payments service and wishlist feature. There are a number of other Amazon-related Twitter accounts of uncertain origin; many of them appear to be third parties pointing to Amazon deals.

Amazon spokesman Craig Berman confirmed some of the official Amazon Twitter accounts, but declined to provide additional information, saying only that “we are constantly experimenting with ways to make it easier for customers to find, discover and buy anything they may want on the internet.”

It’s unclear how much web traffic and revenue Amazon is deriving from Twitter, which lets users send short updates, or "tweets," of 140 characters or less via the web or mobile phone. But Amazon is part of a growing legion of firms, including Comcast, Dell,  and Starbucks, that are dabbling with Twitter and other social networks to build buzz around products and drive sales. In one of the more interesting examples of this trend, candy maker Mars recently incorporated Twitter posts into the website for its Skittles brand (though the campaign quickly became the target of internet pranksters).

Ben Weisman, digital director for the New York office of marketing agency Iris Nation, said Amazon is “absolutely on the front lines” of using Twitter and said the retailer needs to have a presence there to stay connected to its online user base.

“It’s important for brands to take a look at where their user base is and engage them because if they don’t, someone else will,” said Weisman, who specializes in social networks.

Brian Walker, a Seattle-based senior ecommerce analyst for Forrester Research, said Amazon is one of the more active users of Twitter as a “deal notification tool” and said Twitter is “a great engine to drive that kind of activity.” But Walker he said as a whole, Amazon has not fully embraced Twitter’s potential to create two-way communication between company and customer.

“They’re uncertain whether to engage in a conversation,” said Walker.

Some individual Amazon employees, including Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels and web services evangelist Jeff Barr, make clever use of Twitter to engage developers with Amazon’s cloud-computing business (Twitter is a customer of Amazon Web Services, using the S3 service to store user profile photos and backup data). In a sign perhaps of the hunger for interaction with Amazon, a new Twitter account by the name of "jeffbezos" has attracted more than a hundred followers already, even though it's posted only a single test message.

Matt Hulett, CEO of Mpire, a shopping comparison service, said he could imagine scenarios in which Amazon more deeply integrates with Twitter and taps its social networking power -- for example, incorporating relevant Twitter feeds into Amazon product review pages. Or letting people tweet directly from Amazon websites, pointing friends toward deals or commenting on products (Hulett expands on the topic, arguing that Amazon should actually buy Twitter, in his own blog posts here and here).

How else can Amazon make use of Twitter?