Do you use Twitter? Initially, the thought of recording every minutiae of your life over a series of posts, under 140 characters a pop and following others doing the same, seemed like one of the biggest wastes of time around.
Twitter is after all, just a communication tool in much the same way as the telegram, fax and mobile phone were before it. Like it’s forebears, it is after all, just a tool that lets one person connect with another.
Twitter for business
Here’s a quick list of Twitter uses that could be applied a variety of businesses.
- A restaurant tweets their daily specials
- A concert booking agency tweets about-to-expire tickets
- An estate agent tweets new homes on the market
- A specialist car dealer could list latest additions to his showroom
- A personal finance specialist could tweet about relevant blog postings and financial developments.
- A voluntary organisation tweets about upcoming events and promotions.
- An IT company could use Twitter as a customer service portal
Twitter for business / Twitter for fun
As with blogging, it’s important you develop your own tone when using Twitter. Think about who your audience is and what you want to convey. It’s pretty easy to blur the lines between using it for fun and using it for business.
In some cases, it may be better to establish separate Twitter accounts for business and pleasure. How seriously would you take an estate agent on a Monday morning if you could read one of his posts from 12 hours previously where he talks about sinking his tenth pint of lager?
Me? I’ve not quite decided how I want to use Twitter. You can view my Twitter account here. I tend to use it to follow others in the industries I am interested in – it’s great for getting new ideas and differing views on how to do things. I do tend to post tweets but as you’ll see they are of a pretty random vintage and I only really use Twitter in a business sense to draw attention to updates to this website and blog. That’s not to say we’ve not been dissecting it pretty thoroughly and working out how best to use Twitter in business. We’ve also been developing some pretty nifty Twitter applications that integrate nicely with ubiCMS, our own fully-featured content management system.
I expect this to change at some point in the future, but for now it feels right.
How do you use Twitter for business?