Twitter is exploding and currently has over 200 million users. These users aren’t all personal accounts; many are businesses, including small businesses. Are you on Twitter yet with your small business? Twitter may seem intimidating at first with so many users and limited message length of only 140 characters. But you’d be surprised at how you can use those 140 characters to promote your business and connect with your customers. Let’s look briefly at how you can take advantage of Twitter to promote your small business.
As a small business, you need to take advantage all these opportunities to build your brand. Twitter is a free tool, and it doesn’t take much time to get on and tweet things about your company. There are even tools that allow you to schedule your tweets ahead of time, so you don’t have to worry about it if you go on vacation or you get busy. Tweet things about your company that you think your customers would like to know about. Is your small business involved in community outreach? Let your followers know these various things to build your brand. Also, use your company logo as your profile picture and Twitter page background, so followers will get familiar with your logo.
Twitter is an easy way to connect with your customers. Follow as many as you can and then continue adding customers as they add you to their list. You can use tools like Hootsuite to follow certain Hashtags or keywords and get streams of tweets on specific subjects. You can alos follow the tweets about your competitors. It goes beyond just following your customers though, it’s includes interacting with them. Did they say something good about your company? Retweet it and thank them. Did they say something bad about your small business? Acknowledge this immediately either privately or publicly. Address it with them so you can satisfy them and improve your customer service.
After you build a following, tweet specials or sales that you’re having and have some specials just for Twitter followers. You can also pick some of your Twitter followers to test out new products in exchange for them to tweet about it.
Provide the latest company news to your Twitter followers. Did you just acquire a new product? Tweet about it. What about having a new employee joining the team? Tweet about it. Tweet about what is going on in your company to let your followers know.
Twitter allows you to network with other small businesses and colleagues in your industry. You can exchange tips and tricks with them and see what works and doesn’t work in their business. Then apply this knowledge to your small business.
Twitter is another social networking tool that is perfect for your small business. It’s free and only takes a few minutes to write a few tweets and communicate with others. With Twitter, you can build your brand, connect with customers, promote your products, provide the latest company news and network with others. Take advantage of this tool for your small business.
Jim, actually, I disagree with almost every thing you’ve said here. I think you have repeated what is the “going view”, but I question not only some of the interpretations but also some of the “facts”.
First off, 200 million users? Uh, well, no. It’s much much less than that, since Twitter publishes number of accounts, many of which are dormant, bots, and duplicates. The actual number of ACTIVE users who you can communicate with is probably closer to 10 million worldwide.
Second, and this is key, social media doesn’t scale. The worst thing that could happen to a small business is to SUCCEED on Twitter, and receive hundreds or thousands of tweets sent to it. Because then the choice gets tough. Stop responding, or use bots to reply, which are both really bad practices, or spend more time and money to respond and end up having to support one more contact channel. Multiply this by having a presence on Facebook, and several other major platforms, and..well, frankly, it doesn’t work, and it isn’t going to work.
One of the reasons the majority of tweets sent to companies are left unresponded to is that companies see the cost of responding, and are not seeing the return.
Still, and all, the litany of “ya gotta go there” continues.
Passing strange. Twitter isn’t a fad, but I wonder if at some point, people telling small business they HAVE to be on Twitter, IS a fad.
BTW, got any idea what the attrition rate for small businesses is on Twitter — the number of small businesses that create accounts, then abandon them? I don’t have hard numbers, but I see the graveyard every time I cull dead followers.
My advice: If someone (a small business) LIKES Twitter, and the people there enjoy using it, then it may be worth a shot, but as a pure business play for small business, the success prospects are really really bad.
Thanks for the input. Your numbers do paint a different picture. I still think that social media if properly used as a listening platform can tell a small business quite a lot about its “favorite customer”.