Twitter also allows Dell to promote new products and help customers with technical problems, he said.

Dell has landed $1 million of sales using Twitter. Even though that's a fraction of Dell's $61 billion in annual sales, that amount cost almost nothing to procure, Binhammer said.

"It's not so much about selling widgets and gadgets as helping IBM employees engage with each other and the outside world," he said. "This is the next generation of instant messaging."

IBM has more than 1,000 employees using Twitter to share ideas and communicate on research projects. IBM also has its own internal version of the service and uses tweets to do informal surveys.