Taking a break from our regularly scheduled Top 10 Ways to Ruin Your Website series, I recentlt was emailed a question I wanted to share.

Most business people have heard of Twitter, but still have no real sense of how to use it to promote their business. So why should they add this to their daily PR & marketing activities?

And here is my response:

I get asked these questions all the time by clients and when I’m speaking. “Right, I know Twitter is supposed to be the new shiny thing but I just don’t see what it can do for me.” This is usually followed by some comment like: “I don’t care about what someone eats for breakfast” or “no one wants to know about my personal life”. I used to spend a whole lot of time answering the question and explaining, but I’ve gotten down to saying just this:

Let me give you the top 3 reasons you should be using twitter for your business*:

1. Industry Pulse.

2. Polling.

3. News.

1. Imagine having the ability to put your finger on the pulse of your industry.

There are 3 groups of people you need to follow. Don’t follow the people who talk about their coffee break!

• Follow your perfect client, anyone from your target audience. Find out what they are thinking, what matters to them. Ask them questions! (And I mean really ask them questions, not: message me if you have a question about such-and-such)
• Follow your competition. Get in touch with what’s going on in your industry. Learn from their mistakes and advice. This alone makes Twitter invaluable to me.
• Follow people who are movers & shakers in your physical area. Search by city and find out who knows what’s going down. Then you can know and get involved if it helps you business. And, it’s incredible when you become one of the people who others ask: where should I be this week?

2. Polling.

Once you’ve followed the big 3, ask them questions. Smaller companies can’t afford focus groups and big surveys. So do it on Twitter. Ask about products, what they do or don’t use and why. Ask what they think of work you’ve done, etc. I poll before I speak so I have immediate feedback about my topic before I even say a word. Then I know where to focus.

3. Relevant, Fast, News:

My example of the overwhelming ability of Twitter as a news source was the terrorist attacks on Mumbai around Thanksgiving last year. I had CNN on my TV and Twitter streaming live on the Mumbai topic on my laptop. I was getting news on Twitter 30-40 minutes faster than through the television. In fact at some points CNN just read off Twitter and blog entries or used photos/video posted there from people in the middle of everything. But that’s not even the part that hit me hardest. It was that people were using Twitter to find their loved ones. A list of missing people went up on a blog and people forwarded it along through twitter and when someone was found they’d update the list. The news couldn’t even keep up with that, they just listed the website.

If that’s not reason enough to consider spending ten minutes on Twitter while you’re having your bagel in the morning and then ten minutes when you’re winding down from work, I don’t know what is.

*Exceptions are: Twitter is not your target audience. Seriously, research it. I can tell you really quickly who twitter attracts, if that’s not your market don’t waste your time. But since Twitter normally attracts business owners, moms, baby boomers, early tech adopters, bloggers and male executives… that relates to most people on some level, so this disclaimer is mostly just to make naysayers feel better.

Tags: Business, Email response, News, Polling, Short, Twitter, Twitter Bird

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 18th, 2009 at 6:46 pm and is filed under Social Media, Veribatim. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.