Are you soaking in the Twitter buzz yet? According to the recent comScore statistics reported that Twitter.com is having a double and triple digit growth month on month.
comScore Media Matrix Mar 09
comScore Media Matrix Apr 09
Right, so this new kid on the block, a rising star, is gaining media’s and blogger’s love. Looking beyond the popularity race and beyond the buzz, have you discovered any practical use of twitter for your business? Should I say, have you asked “How do you use twitter for business?” Let me share some ideas on how you can start using twitter for your business.
Getting Started:
- Step 1 – A practical starting point for business users would be to search for “talk / tweet” about your business area, your product model, service provided. If there are chats between two or more people you can monitor and seek to understand what’s being discussed as well. There are tools available for monitoring / following twitter conversation, I would suggest: tweet2tweet.appspot.com
- Step 2 – Scan for tweeters who use your product “How do I…” and “Your Brand/ Product Model/ Company Name” kind of tweets. You can do so using search.twitter.com, however I would like to recommend tweetdeck. You will love this application!
- Step 3 – Do advance search by using “WWWWH type of keyword question” AND / OR “Brand/Model/Service” This is especially useful if you have specific brand name or trademark.
- Step 4 – Inference is the next question here. What can you gather about a particular product? Is your instruction manual unclear? Is there a potential product fault that the company may have missed?
- Step 5 – Decipher the information that you have found.
The information/ tweets you found on twitter are very rich in content value. Starting from the search you have found tweets that may be of interest to you and want to probe further. Let’s say you found tweets about your product that says the following.
Does anyone know how to copy and paste text on an iphone / ipod touch? (via twitter search)
What does it infer? Needs a small instruction placed somewhere?
The downside of getting Mom the iPod that she wanted is having to teach her how to use it. My parents and technology tend to be incompatable. (via twitter search)
How are the older adults adapting to the device? Are they having trouble using it?
With the information you have found, use it to do the following:
- Problem Solving – Don’t you think some of the tweet looks like a “bone” from the Ishikawa diagram / Fishbone Chart? This is the most obvious one that comes to my mind, probably because I used it frequently in the course of my work. None the less, I have not come across anyone mentioning it! Surprise, Surprise.
Ishikawa diagram / Fishbone Chart
- Build a Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) live – Gather the intelligence and compile a FAQ of that product on your site. Be relevant and do not write questions which you think are FAQs, they may not necessary be the most asked about ones.
FAQ
- Live Online Suggestion Box? – Check if there are interesting suggestions that can be turn into a new product or new services. Roll out product enhancements from the suggestions gather.
- Customer Feedback Channel – Now this is the most obvious one isn’t it. In fact, just a few days ago it is reported that FMCG Company Pepsi, PepsiRaw cans are donning @PepsiRaw twitter address.
Image via revolutionmagazine.com | @PepsiRaw twitter name on can
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Added http://www.ministryofsocialmedia.com to GoogleReader!
Have a nice day
Hobosic
Hi Scott,
On small and large businesses using twitter.
Front End: Main difference is really dependent on what is your purpose of using twitter. E.g. if you purpose is customer service, then there is a tendency for more @reply and chat streams. Check out @wholefoods for reference. Some larger business tends to be a little more reserve in using twitter, and use it more for pushing out info streams.
BackEnd: Oh, big difference, they could be having one person managing one twitter account, they would have a larger team to do online surveying as well.
Facebook & Twitter integration is quite an obvious choice as they are the high traffic sites. On this -> [very small “mom & pops”] & [big guys like Queensland and Goode] it’s not just pure Social Media but rather being “found” on the internet. I would say SM is like a fast track entry point. If we are on the web, we are under the mercy of Google, why? Because it’s the largest search engine.
Last but not least, I googled around your wine shop, you have a lot of room to increase exposure. You are doing not too bad… I’ve seen your twitter stream.
Great advise but what do you think about the differences of small vs large businesses using Twitter? We’re a small wine shop, but we’re doing a lot on Facebook & Twitter – we just launched a promotion for someone to win a B&B Dream Vacation along the Blue Ridge Parkway yesterday to see how very small “mom & pops” can use social media to get the sort of results that the big guys like Queensland and Goode are doing. We’ll see if people are as competitive to get a vacation as they are to get a job. More info here: http://whyineedabreak.ning.com