Why Your Business Should Use Twitter

Many businesses continue to struggle with why they should use Twitter. Pick up a copy of Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods by Shel Israel. It’s a fantastic book that documents the birth and growth of Twitter as an incredible new medium for businesses to communicate through.

As I was reading the book, Shel mentioned several reasons a company might want to use Twitter. I think many of them are worth listing… along with some discussion…as well as a few others.

1. Distributing Coupons and Offers – since Twitter is a permission-based communication platform, it’s the perfect channel for distributing offers. Good friend Adam Small has seen this in the restaurant and real estate industries – where a combination of Mobile Alerts, Twitter, Facebook, Blogging and syndication have helped grow all of his clients’ businesses… while in a down market!
2. Communicating with Employees – rather than tying up email servers or wasting people’s time in meeting rooms, Twitter is a great collaboration tool. In fact, that’s why it was first created by Odeo under the name Twttr (i and the e dropped for less typing for SMS!)
3. Receiving Customer Complaints – companies constantly fight to avoid their dirty laundry being put out in the public eye. The irony is that consumers no longer believe in 5-star service. The most aggressive promotion and criticism of companies typically come after their response… or inactivity. By accepting customer complaints openly, other consumers can see what kind of company you really are.
4. Finding or Posting a Job – Recruiters and seekers are using Twitter to post about job openings or job wanted ads. With a geographic search, you can even locate how close you are to finding employment, and you can combine other terms for your search.
5. Information Seeking and Sharing – Back when I had under one thousand visitors, Twitter had become a great alternative to search engines. Typically, the answers I get are very relevant because those who follow me work in the same industry as I do.
6. Inbound Marketing Strategy – while working at a content management platform I cofounded, we noticed that the number and quality of inbound leads from Twitter were much more likely to convert than those from search. Although search engines gave us massive volumes of visitors, we began advising clients to get on board with Twitter and automate their feeds via tools like Revive Social.
7. Humanizing Business – businesses that have little or no contact with the public are finding that providing a human touch is great for business and required for customer retention. If your business is struggling with providing human interaction and is resource-starved, Twitter is a great medium. It need not be monitored all day (although I’d advise it… speedy replies get oohs and aahs), but a response from a faceless company by an actual person with an avatar is always cool.
8. Personal Branding – alongside humanizing business, is the ability for employees or business owners to also build a personal brand. Building a personal brand online can lead to many things… perhaps even starting your own agency as I did! Be selfish about your career. Too many people who were worried about what their company might think if they put themselves out in the public eye are now looking for jobs because that same company laid them off.
9. Twitter Search Optimization with Hashtags – searches on Twitter are becoming more and more common. Get found by using hashtags effectively in your Tweets or auto-post mechanisms.
10. Effective Networking – online networking is a great precursor to offline networking. I can’t tell you how many prospects I’ve met through Twitter. Some of us knew each other for months before connecting offline, and that has led to some great business relationships.
11. Viral Marketing – Twitter is the ultimate in viral marketing. The Retweet (RT) is an incredibly powerful tool… pushing your message from network to network to network in a matter of minutes. I’m not sure that there is a quicker viral technology on the market right now.
12. Fund-raising – Shel writes some great examples of how companies have effectively utilized Twitter for philanthropic endeavors. The benefit is to both the business and the charity, since the business’s involvement is better publicized on Twitter than if it had just made a mention on a website somewhere.
13. Online Ordering – Aside from coupons and offers, some folks are even taking customer orders online. Shel writes about a coffee shop where you can Tweet in your order and go pick it up. Very cool!
14. Public Relations – Since Twitter works at the speed of typing 140 characters, your company can get ahead of everyone… the competition, the media, leaks… by having an aggressive PR strategy that incorporates Twitter. When you make the announcement first, people come to you. Don’t leave it up to traditional media or a blogger to get things right… Use Twitter to command and direct the communication.
15. Communicate Alerts – have a problem with your company and need to communicate with your customers or prospects? Twitter can be a great way of doing this. Pingdom has even added Twitter Alerts to its services… what a great idea! Except… when Twitter goes down, they can’t use the service ;) An alert can be a great thing as well… perhaps to notify your customers that a product is back in stock.

Shel notes that some of the business use cases in his books can’t be directly attributed to revenue. Though this is true, they can ultimately be measured and a return on investment applied. I’m confident that a customer service department tracking call volume and Tweets can measure whether Twitter reduces average call volume since the answers are publicized. As with #15… if my site goes down and it’s Tweeted… then those folks are going to be less apt to call me to let me know since they see that I’ve already confirmed the issue.