"5 Great Resources for Using Twitter for Business and Your Brand"

Twitter has gone mainstream in the last few months and with it the multiple ways and means of using it to promote your product, brand and service has escalated. The tools available are burgeoning and maturing (thats for the next blog). Its being linked into facebook, blogs and websites. Its being used to help customer service, in fact Zappos has nearly all its staff on their own twitter accounts to help interact and support their customers.

Its also being used to promote a Pizza brand and its increasing sales by 15% in some cases. 

But, its not as widespread in other locations as it is in San Francisco and other high takeup areas - “yet” … so its not maybe as useful at this point in time for your suburb, city or country, never the less it cannot be ignored and  its ability to broadcast in real time, to tens of thousands of people and customers at no cost except your time is something  that has to be seriously considered. Twitter can tease and tempt you. It invites you to click on that link and see where it goes, or to listen to that track of music from Blip.fm,  (Great if you are a band or a singer and want to promote your Gig or song and let people hear your music).

So as a business, its ability to deliver your message is something you ignore it at your peril.    

1.  “Twitter Proves Its Worth as a Killer App for Local Businesses”

New Orleans’ own Naked Pizza (@NAKEDpizza) is changing the minds of experts and engaging its local community – using Twitter – in a profitable way.  Naked Pizza is effectively using Twitter for communications, customer service and most importantly, new sales. 

There has been a LOT written about Twitter in general and as a marketing and branding tool.  But as yet, there is no primer, no “Twitter for Business for Dummies.”

Even without a primer Jeff Leach, co-owner of Naked Pizza, seems to be well on the way to figuring it out.  That’s not to say that Jeff’s approach would map to the “best practices” of Public Relations (PR) and Social Media (SM) pros but it’s working for @NAKEDpizza and most importantly Jeff is tying it to metrics which matter to his business

2. “How To Build Your Personal Brand on Twitter”

 Today, Twitter has roughly 6 million users and is projected to grow to 18.1 million users by 2010. With all those people, the chances for networking are endless and connecting with new people can lead to career opportunities, so it is essential that your personal brand exists on the service. Last blog I showed you a step-by-step process for building your personal brand on Facebook, and today we’re going to show you how to do the same thing on Twitter. By leveraging the Twitter platform to build your brand you can showcase yourself to a huge and growing audience.

3.  “10 Essential Twitter Tools For Business” 

Most people struggle when it comes to using Twitter effectively. This may be especially true for businesses, which tend to feel pressure to join Twitter, but don’t quite know where to begin. If you want to use Twitter, but aren’t sure how to use it well, these process by using these 10 essential Twitter tools for business may help smooth the learning curve:

4. “7 Questions Some Brands Are Asking About Twitter”

 Here are some of the excellent questions organizations and other brands are starting to ask:

5. “How To Use Twitter For Customer Service”

Customer service can evoke some serious misgivings or negative emotions. Although customer support is designed to help the consumer, the pain of waiting for a phone representative and the impersonal emails can cause more damage than good for a brand. People are turned off by the term and companies have begun to use different terminology to describe their efforts.

This is not how customer service has to be. With the connectivity made possible by social media, companies have found a new way to engage their customers, solve their problems, and build goodwill for their brands: Twitter. Understanding how Twitter can transform customer relations for the better can be substantial for reducing costs and improving brand image.