Everyone has heard the statistic about 60% of people that join Twitter quit in a month. Of course, they do. There’s too much snake oil. Auto-DM’s that are spam and annoying. So many fake followers, which amounts to a lot of extra email. Plus you are thrown into the pool without a swimming lesson and no way to grab the edges.
Here’s an example of how Six Apart leverages Twitter and the web to connect to its community.
The voice of the customer is indeed different on Twitter, and it’s
interesting to interact with customers on that level. There’s a certain element of surprise that often comes into play when folks don’t know we’re listening.
We’ve also been using Get Satisfaction for our community forum – they have a nifty “Overheard” feature that starts a topic by overhearing a Tweet about us, and we can answer their question/concern/praise in the forum. I find that really valuable for questions folks ask a lot that should be surfaced out of the immediacy of Twitter-verse and archived for others to read, if they want to.
Businesses are utilizing Twitter in a variety of ways, including:
- to resolve customer issues and concerns;
- learn what people are interested in and not interested in;
- market their services and products;
- increase visibility;
- connect with their audiences personally and engage;
- search for new prospects
Twitter can be extremely useful for businesses when used properly, according to Steve Cadley of the Cadley Consulting Group.
“We actually have a client who uses Twitter as a prospecting tool. He is able to search for key words regarding his target audience and started to tweet to
those who were potential prospects. Thus far he has closed $50K worth of new
business from prospecting through Twitter. So yes Twitter is becoming a very
powerful business tool.”
Business people are still trying to figure out Twitter, I think. Is it a listening tool? A broadcast tool? Text messaging to the masses? A new form of IM/chat? Or something else entirely?
You have people like Guy Kawasaki with a team of people broadcasting (I call it puking) all over twitter. Shouting ‘Look at my stuff’ ‘Look at my stuff’. That works if you have a mass appeal product and the number of followers. It isn’t authentic nor is it social. Would you go to a party and scream at everyone? Hey, come to my place? Hey, I just updated my blog?
If you did it via email, it would be spam. If you did it in person, you would wind up all alone. So why would you do that on a social network? (The key word being Social).
It’s micro-blogging, not mass texting.
Micro-blogging means that you have an interesting but short message.
Social media means that you are trying to connect with people; have a dialogue; interact. That attitude will eventually get you business. It works about as well as going to networking events and being interested in others as opposed to seeing how many business cards you can hand out in one hour.
Search your keywords, @ reply to the folks with value-able information. Give Value first. From there, you can develop a relationship. That’s where the money is.
My niche is narrow. I just want to give more information to those in my niche and learn what is going on in the industry. For that it’s like a news feed. And in a target I think it will work well. But most people aren’t Ashton, Oprah or Guy. And not everyone can hire someone to tweet all day. So use this social tool intelligently and treat it like a networking event. (Many say it is a cocktail party, but I don’t see that).
