Smart companies use Twitter. Here's how.
Michael Arrington at TechCrunch has great piece today about Comcast using Twitter to as an early warning system. Add this to your list of ways to get business value from Twitter.
Increasingly, businesses are using Twitter and learning about their customers from it. For instance, someone from Zappo’s – they of the best customer service story ever – started following me on Twitter this past weekend (before I dropped a couple hundred bucks on shoes for me and my family). And I suspect I’ll hear from them again.
It’s become increasingly fashionable for people to claim Twitter is a waste of time or useless. But in practice it’s increasingly useful as a tool for smart business folks to learn what their customers care about. If smart companies use Twitter, why don’t you?
UPDATE: McNeil just learned a valuable lesson about Twitter with a failed commercial. You can read what they did wrong and how to avoid that here.
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Im one of those who thinks Twitter is a useless time waster. However your article gives me some reason to think the thing may have a use. Frankly I dont CARE what Robert Scoble is doing at this second. However, if there are business uses, then I might consider it.
Eric,
Originally, I thought Twitter had little value. These days, I’m finding increasing use and utility. Give it try. I suspect you will, too.
I do think that Twitter has value for people in the web’s public eye, but monitoring and reacting to complaints on Twitter and in the blogosphere just isn’t enough.
http://blog.ryanmickle.com/index.php/2008/04/08/the-comcast-twitter-attack/
Thanks for the post.
Ryan,
Great post on the Arrington/Comcast blowup. I think you’re very right about its ability to scale. But for small businesses, such scalability may not be an issue. Getting people to talk about your business in the first place, that’s the hard bit. And Twitter is a great place to engage with those most likely to talk about it.
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how do i even begin building a company profile on Twitter? it appears to start, it’s only for an individual?
thanks.
Hi G,
Thanks for your comment. This is a great question that really gets to the core of marketing within a social media context. Give me a couple of days and I’ll address this in a separate post.
Keep reading and thanks again for the outstanding question.
Tim
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We’ve been on the fence about joining Twitter, as time isn’t exactly on our side.Would you say Twitter is still worth it, even if we have limited time to use it and we wouldn’t be tweeting every day?
Thanks for your comment. Yes, I think for many businesses Twitter is still an excellent resource. The first rule of social media marketing is to listen to your customers. If your customers (or other groups you want to connect with) are using Twitter and talking about things you care about, it is an excellent tool to improve your connections.