Twitter For Business

I have written about micro-blogging as being a great tool for internal communication in business. But how useful are services like Twitter for actual customer communications?

 I think there are some clear reasons why it’s an appropriate tool for customer communication (if you use it correctly.) 


- Twitter is very easy to setup and its free.

- Twitter offers another channel of distribution. What you are doing the moment you start attracting followers is leveraging the Twitter community. A good percentage of which will almost certainly not be your current audience.


- Twitter is another way to access your site's content. Obviously, Twitter can grow traffic to your site. If the number and quality of followers is great enough, including links to your site content could catch people you ordinarily would not.


- Twitter introduces a dimension of frequency. You have a publishing mechanism which is virtually instant and so it is easier to achieve both:

Regular updates for your customers

An outward indication that there are 'things happening' and that there is a 'pulse' at your company.


- Twitter facilitates dialogue. Using the reply and direct message functions means that there is a simple mechanism for 'informal' exchanges with your customers.


- Twitter 'tweets' are succinct. Twitter forces you to cut to the point and this could potentially save time by cutting down on 'corporate speak.' 


- Twitter is fun. In the main your experience with Twitter will be positive, perhaps because it simulates 'real time' updates that are a more balanced and measured reflection of one's 'mood' than you get in an email.

 You can follow lovemoney.com’s experiment with twitter, here.