Is Twitter a Business Tool?
Everywhere you turn people are talking about twitter and the tweets that are flying around the internet. It is clear that people are signing up to twitter in their thousands and some people believe it can be used as a business tool – just check out the new book by Joel Comm and Ken Burge called Twitter Power – How to Dominate Your Market One Tweet at a Time.
However the question still remains is twitter a nice social media fad or can it be used as a serious business tool?
The first question is what is twitter? Basically it is an online SMS service where you can send a 140 character “tweet” to those people who have signed up to follow you and they can receive it via the twitter website, cell phone, email, instant messenger or even face book. It is great way in which you can find out what people you know are doing and they can follow what you are up to.
There is a cute little animation that gives a great overview of twitter – click here to see it .
So far so good, and so what I hear you ask. Well as exciting as it is hearing that someone has gotten up, cleaned their teeth and are getting dressed for work, there are more interesting business related applications.
- Let customers know of new changes to products or services
- Poll customers for their thoughts on what can be done better
- Use it to manage stunt marketing or limited time special offers
- Keep track of what people are saying about your products and services
- Publicise events that are coming up
- Get in touch with the Gen Y’s and Millenniums
- Reduce the cost of inter team communication
- Allow customers to query some of your databases (check out how Vayusphere is using this to access Zillow’s Zestimate database)
At Classified Ad Ventures, we use twitter to keep people aware of new articles on our Property Portal Watch, Jobs Portal Watch and Property Ad Guru news and information sites.
At ArtsHub we are experimenting with using twitter to run competitions and to encourage people to renew their subscriptions.
While all of this sounds wonderful in theory, the jury is still out on whether this is a killer application for business, one of the many tools that business will use, or just a fad that goes the way of yoyo’s and slinkies.
The real challenge is building a strong following and keeping them up to date with relevant information that cuts through the hundreds of tweets being received all day, every day.
In my view, it will be part of the social media armoury that consumer marketing people leverage to build a strong customer base. It will help whittle away at traditional media and their revenue streams.
The one question I am yet to see discussed in detail or get a real answer on is how will Twitter make any money from this?
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This a great post that outlines that twitter isn’t really all about what color socks I’m wearing today.
I find the service highly valuable for finding and sharing useful and valuable information in an easily digestable form.
As far as their future revenue – the answer is real time search. If you want the latest scoop on something going on right now – it’s the twitter neural network. Google can’t compete with this. Perhaps the big questions for them are:
a) will G buy them, and if not who
b) could twttr gazump G just like David did?
Sam
@samotage
there is another way to look at it.
as a viral distribution channel. look at how tweetboard.com operates for an excellent example.
have a look at how http://tweetboard.com/ is getting people to sign up via twitter for their beta service. you need to tweet your application to them. first this means *ALL* your followers see the link and potentially investigate it.
the second part is how it actually operates on the site itself. when you post a comment on a site, you do it via twitter. so now. not only to visitors on the site see your comments, *ALL* your followers do as well with a nice link back to the site.
We use twitter throughout the news day to keep abreast of what other news outlets are doing. I also post skeds so our subscribers know if AAP will cover a press conference, which allows our subscribers to send their journalists to other pressers. Finally, because I was new to Brisbane, my head shot on twitter made me recognisable to other journos and even those holding the press event. We have known about many stories as they are unfolding from twitter before we even hear about them on the radio or we are alerted to them. Twitter is a valuable tool in the newsroom toolbox.
I work in the film industry (at least rental of) and we’ve taken to these networking sites to post opinions, reviews and news, as well as plug movies we want to work for us. But recently we’ve seen the opposite effect, with Bruno copping bad reviews after opening night which led to a drop of over 40% in ticket sales from friday (opening night) to saturday. It has been rare to see such an immediate reaction to a movie, but Twitter and Facebook allow opinion to be braodcast worldwide instantly, and with such a polarising movie, the effect is probably magnified.
I think twitter is an awesome business tool. It’s a great way to gauge customer satisfaction as well as provide better support.
Not long ago I was having issues with a bandwidth provider in our datacenter. Eventually I got frustrated with customer support giving me the run around and I turned to twitter to vent. Within 5 minutes of the rant I got a direct message from a lead engineer of the bandwidth provider and within the hour my issues were resolved.