10 Ways To Use Twitter For Business

Twitter has been around for a couple of years now and is now receiving over 50 Million unique visitors a month. It’s use as a tool for business has never been seen before in the history of the web. Twitters credibility has increased in recent months as it has struck deals with Bing (Microsoft’s search engine) as well as Google to provide real time search feeds. In this video we look at ten different ways you can use Twitter for business to increase revenue and traffic, improve service and reduce costs.

Note: I have also summarised the video’s content below in text format so that those who can’t view it due to slow internet connections or prefer reading to viewing can do so.

10 Reasons Why Twitter Is Great For Business

1. You can monitor real time conversation about your brand that can assist your marketing and management teams to see what is really being about your company today (not tomorrow or next week  as would be normal on Google or with Media and the Press) and modify marketing campaigns based on the monitoring.
2. Perform real time searches about your industry including your monitoring your competitors and seeing what is being said on Twitter about them. Some tools that can be used for this are Tweetdeck (columns can be set up for each type of keyword or phrase) and Google alert amongst many
3. Broadcast links and headlines that can drive traffic to your website, blog, landing pages and YouTube channels
4. Improve customer service  (A good case study on this is “ Zappos” an online shoe retailer)  by picking up conversations about your company that you might not be aware of and respond quickly to shut down any impending service or potentially damaging PR disasters.
5. Communicate and engage within your buinesses marketplace, sector or niche through direct messages commenting on their blogs via twitter and retweeting their tweets (You will be surprised how easily it can be to connect with someone that would not take a phone call or respond to an email).  
6. Run special deals and promotions on Twitter that you can use to drive traffic or move slow moving stock (exanple Dell)
7. Build your your company’s and or personal brand through positioning yourself as a thought leader through posting great tweets and embedded links leading back to your blog or website
8. Share your ideas internally in a very efficient manner through the latest feature from Twitter called lists that can be private or open
9. It can be used to humanise a faceless conglomerate  (see David Meerman Scotts Video at General Motors) and remove the company ivory tower persona by Tweeting about  the real issues and responding to  other people’s tweets within your industry.
10. Connect to leaders in your industry through following other thought leaders and commenting on their tweets (Twitter etiquette usually means if you follow someone they follow you back)

So how are you using Twitter for business?