The Business Benefits of using Twitter

Roshan Mehta, 25 November 2010

Twitter, tweet, retweet, direct tweet, follow, followers. These are some of the words you may be familiar with if you are an active user of the Twitter social networking service. But what is Twitter and how can it help my business? 

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When Twitter first launched, I saw people tweeting things like “I have just made a ham sandwich”, not something you’d expect your followers to show interest in or retweet. But there is so much more to Twitter than just connecting and sharing messages with friends. Twitter can be used as a powerful business marketing tool to gain more customers, increase your revenue, and share ideas with other businesses or individuals in your industry.

Obtaining feedback from your followers
Twitter not only allows you to share information with your followers, it allows you to ask them questions to obtain their opinions. This way you can easily cater to your followers needs by Tweeting more about the topics that they are interested in, which can ultimately lead to a large number of followers.

Reaching out to your followers FAST!
Twitter makes it easy to reach out to your followers at an incredible rate. You can simply Tweet a message to all of your followers in no time at all. They can then retweet that message to each of their followers and so on. In the space of a few hours, millions of people around the world would have received the message which could potentially gain more customers for your business.

Setting up messages is also extremely quick. You can tweet out brief “tag lines” such as “CRM 2011 is on the way”. These Tweets are limited to 140 characters. Here at Magnetism, when we want to share content larger than this 140 character limit such as blog posts, we simply tweet the URL of the blog post with each of our followers. This is a great way to draw traffic to your website and read more information about your business without you having to send out additional tweets.

Twitter on your website
Twitter has a number of widgets which you can add to any page on your website. These widgets give you the ability to let visitors to your website share any page with each of their followers with a few clicks. They can also display the number of times a particular page has been shared with other Twitter users.

Twitter on your mobile
Smartphones have become a necessity for many business workers today. Twitter for mobile adds to the idea of rapidly reaching out to your followers even when you are away from your computer. Again, it is as simple as tweeting a message to your followers or sending a link to a page for them to find out more information.

Learn more about what’s going on in the industry
I’ve already mentioned that you can have multiple followers on Twitter, but what’s to stop your business from following the tweets of others in the industry? This opportunity allows you to learn more about what’s going on in the industry and improve the skill level within your business.

These are just a few of the main benefits of using Twitter as a business tool in your organization. Visit the Twitter website to find out what other options are provided to reach out to your customers and ultimately grow your business.

Follow us on twitter @MagnetismNZ

* Image from http://static.technorati.com/10/08/23/16719/twitter-follow-achiever.jpg