small business
Fame is tweetıng Reaching customers in a few well-chosen words
MEDIA BAKERY
By Scott Steinberg
No surprise, then, that industry leaders
such as Dell (@DellOutlet), Zappos (@Zappos)
and Starbucks (@Starbucks) use Twitter to
drive direct sales, offer promotional discounts
and engage shoppers with their brand. But
from organic groceries (@spudvancouver) to
mentoring services (@boldlybeautiful) to commercial real estate brokers (@ChrisFyvie), a
legion of scrappy upstarts are also using it to
turbo-charge their business.
BETWEEN BILLBOARDS, TV spots and
event-based advertising, corporate giants
such as Coca-Cola, Rogers and Shell often
boast marketing budgets comparable to the
gross domestic product of some Third World
nations. So how’s a small-business owner
to compete?
The answer: in 140 characters or less.
Just ask Costco members, such as Umi
Sushi (@umi), who are leveraging the power
of social networking service Twitter to reach
thousands of potential customers. “In an
economy like this, small-business owners
need to spread the word efficiently and
affordably,” explains Steve Strauss (@Steve
Strauss), author of The Small Business Bible
(Wiley, 2008). “Social networking is word-of-
mouth advertising for the 21st century … and
that’s the best advertising there is.”
Doug Burgoyne, founder of Vancouver-based
FROGBOX (@FROGBOX), a provider of sus-
tainable alternatives to cardboard moving
boxes. “It’s always one of the top five referral
sources to our website.” Burgoyne, who uses
the service to communicate with customers
and promote environmental awareness, says
it’s prompted a five-fold increase in online
traffic and increased sales by 18 per cent.
Snakehead Games (@starpiratesgame),
creator of online amusement Star Pirates, has
also been thrilled with Twitter’s impact. The
Toronto-based firm found that buying paid
tweets from celebrities generated up to 700
per cent more click-throughs than traditional
Internet advertisements and resulted in more
than 1,000 new sign-ups. It further discov-
ered that the service was a great way to gener-
ate awareness and build support from fans.
“The real value of Twitter is as a two-way
communication tool that allows you to build
a community amongst people who have simi-
lar interests,” says Snakehead director Colin
Ferguson. “It shows that we’re responsive to
users’ opinions, which directly or indirectly
turns into sales.”
Edmonton resident Tom Drake, a Costco
member who self-publishes the Canadian
Finance Blog (@CanadianFinance), is also a
believer. “In March of 2009, [we had] 816 vis-
its,” he says. “One year after starting to use
Twitter to promote the site, we now receive
almost 30,000 visits a month, and [have
earned] nearly $4,000 in advertising sales. It’s
allowed my wife to stay home and care for our
baby beyond the maternity-leave period.”
“Twitter is powerful, free and ubiquitous,”
confirms Guy Kawasaki (@guykawasaki), co-
founder of Alltop.com and a social media
personality, with more than 219,000 followers
on Twitter himself. “It’s hard to beat that as a
combination for small-business marketing.”
“Twitter’s been great for business,” says
Top Twitter apps and services
Twitter is a free micro-blogging service
that lets users share “tweets,” brief text messages of up to 140 characters that other individuals can follow and redistribute, and the
platform’s popularity continues to boom.
With 75 million users who send more than
50 million real-time updates a day, it’s a
classic case study in frequency and reach.
Readily transportable between connected
online devices, from smartphones to PCs,
tweets not only travel wherever users do, they
also constantly keep certain topics, individuals and, naturally, businesses top of mind.
TweetMeme: Adds a “retweet” button to any story on your blog or website,
allowing users to share it. The more
retweets, the more value an article’s perceived to contain, potentially generating
massive reader pass-along.
oneforty: A one-stop shop where you
can go to search, browse and rate the hottest new Twitter applications, with an entire
section devoted to business-related apps.
clicks and customer engagement.
Co Tweet: Offers an enterprise-level
solution for businesses looking to manage
multiple Twitter accounts, track rising keywords and trends, and delegate the duty of
responding to incoming messages among
numerous individuals.
HootSuite: Lets you schedule tweets
to go live at set times, monitor chatter surrounding your brand, balance work flow
among a team of contributors, and track
TweetDeck: A social media browser
that aggregates Twitter, Facebook,
MySpace and LinkedIn updates under one
banner, allowing you to easily organize and
keep abreast of breaking news from myriad
sources, plus share updates among services.—SS
