Twitter for Small Businesses
As I mentioned in a previous post, I will begin dissecting Twitter to uncover how it can be used for small business marketing. I will focus my posts around five major topics and provide step by step processes for using Twitter in your small business marketing. 
- What is Twitter?
- Why would I want to do Twitter marketing?
- How can you create an effective Twitter presence?
- How to do Twitter marketing
- Twitter tools you can use to do Twitter marketing
Let me start with a description of Twitter.
What is Twitter?
By now you have probably hear the Twitter description. It is a social networking site, a micro blog, that allows you to tell people in 140 characters or less “What you are doing right now.” Let me break that description down into marketing terms.
- Twitter is a social media website. It is one of the many social media websites that make up Web 2.0. As a website it gives your business an additional presence on the internet that can be used to drive potential customers to your business.
- Like other social media sites, Facebook, Linkedin and thousands of other sites, it is an interactive website. People who join Twitter are expected to participate in the conversations by listening and commenting.
- Last year Twitter had 8 million participants. This year that number is 22 million. It is the fastest growing social media site on the internet. Already, Twitter has more businesses on its site than Facebook has with its 200 million participants.
- The people who use Twitter tend to be older (45-54) than other social media sites. People who use social media sites have 25% more disposal able income than those who don’t.
- If you searched Twitter’s top 75 topics, you would find 30% of these topics deal with entertainment. This heavy emphasis on entertainment may reflect the current bias against using Twitter to promote business to retail sites. However, with the growth of Twitter, it will become more diverse.
- Twitter is real time communication tool. The real time quality was dramatically shown during the recent Iranian crisis when the government shut down traditional media sources and the world learned about the events via Twitter. Communications is instantaneous.
- Tweets are not caught in spam filters like many emails. There is no need to open a Tweet, because the entire Tweet (140 characters) is right there on your home page.) Twitter will have an impact on traditional email marketing efforts.
- The key to Twitter’s marketing functions is getting “followers”. You can grow a list of potential customers very rapidly using Twitter without the usual limitations involved in list building. No stamps; no stuffing of envelopes.
- Twitter can be linked to cell phones with internet connections so it becomes a very portable tool for everyone to use.
- Twitter is FREE.
To be continued, your comments are welcomed…
Al Hanzal
