May 2009

Twitter is everywhere, it’s the latest buzz word, but can it really be used to generate business? Firstly, for the uninitiated, here is a basic explanation. Twitter describe themselves as a ‘micro-blogging platform’ a social networking service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate, and stay connected, through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing? Effectively it is a virtual notice board, an online post-it note – keeping people updated on what you’re up to, and they can keep you up to date with what they’re up to.

But here’s what makes Twitter different, you only have 140 characters to tell people what you’re doing, Hence all of the messages (or ‘tweets’ as they’re known) are short and snappy.

So, where exactly is the business benefit? For a moment think about the millions of people using Twitter everyday, the number of consumers. Could Twitter help generate sales?

Twitter is a bit like an RSS feed to a blog that you want to keep up with. If your tweets are interesting, funny, valuable and enjoyable then people can choose to ‘follow’ – they automatically receive your new tweets. A skilled ‘tweeter’ can build a large following very quickly. A following that listens to you. Once you have a large following you can start to drop in the odd promotion, sales message and special offer.

But it must be very subtle, because Twitter is the ultimate ‘permission based’ community. The people who ‘follow’ you are subscribing to receive every tweet you post. If they start to see you as a self-serving, self- publicist they will simply stop following – and once they stop listening, you can’t sell them anything. If you can manage the subtlety and nuances required, it is possible to generate a few thousand followers on Twitter, build a personality and a relationship with them and then give them an offer or promotion that is genuinely beneficial.

There are four different ways companies are using Twitter today:
• Direct
• Indirect
• Internal
• Inbound Signalling

DIRECT

This is where a company tweets regularly to keep their followers up to date with company activity. This can be short and newsy – new customer wins, press releases, case studies, job alerts, etc. This is straight forward, but it is not particularly interesting and will not grab you thousands of followers. This should be used as an upfront communications exercise, with promotional messages kept to a minimum; concentrating instead on building trust.

INDIRECT

This is a more subtle approach. You simply get trusted employees to ‘tweet’ on the company’s behalf. This is a great way to give your business a personality and let employees enhance your business’s reputation by proxy – it’s ‘word of mouth’ rather than outright self-promotion. If your employees are seen to be passionate advocates of your products or services, then these ‘tweets’ are more likely to generate interest. It can also pay to let authorised employees make ‘special offers’ to your Twitter followers. It makes them feel special and can help attract new followers. But be careful with your choice of staff – imagine what a negative effect a disgruntled employee could have if they have access to your Twitter account!

INTERNAL

Try using Twitter as a simple intranet – to improve communication between departments and use it as a discussion platform for staff to put forward or brainstorm ideas.

This will not generate business, but may well improve staff productivity and overall output through suggestions and team working. However, Twitter is not secure – it is a public place, so do not discuss anything private or confidential.

INBOUND SIGNALLING

This is a complicated way of saying that you use Twitter not to talk – but listen. There are several free applications like Twendz and search.twitter.com which you can use to see what’s being said about certain companies, brands, products and services. You can even choose to be alerted whenever key words are mentioned using an application called Tweetbeep.

This is very valuable for market research purposes as it is ‘vox pop’ qualitative data – direct comment from consumers, and live focus groups, talking honestly about certain subjects. Here’s where you can be very ‘sneaky beaky’. If you use Tweetbeep to find people talking about a product or service that you offer, there is a good chance that if you follow them, then they will follow you back – straight back to your feed into your website: drawing prospective customers, where hopefully they’ll stick. They don’t call it the web for nothing.

TWIT 2 WOO

For all Twitter’s odd terminology, it’s exactly the same as every other marketing discipline. Firstly find your target market, build trust, put your products or services in front of them in a compelling way, test, learn and improve. It’s not the easiest marketing tool – it takes subtlety, guile and understanding to get the most out of it and experience will surely throw up even more opportunities. Tweet away.

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