Recently I was surfing around the various tech forums and noticed the same question posted everywhere asking what is quickly becoming an almost universal catch phrase. “Do you Twitter?” Not surprisingly, one of the first responses is invariably an almost classic one. “What’s a Twitter?”
If you are one of those respondents, don’t be ashamed. Twitter is a fairly recent phenomenon in the social networking space. It is a free “microblogging” service that allows mobile users and others to connect with one another in quick text message blasts consisting of 140 characters or less. Twitter was officially launched in October 2006 and quickly grew in popularity among the social networking crowd. More recently, however, Twitter has enjoyed a surge in popularity and growth. It is so popular, in fact, that it suffers from periodic glitches and down times from overload, or “too many tweets.” One such outage occurred as recently as this morning.
With this surge in popularity comes potential opportunity. Where there are people, there is an audience. Where there is an audience, there is a potential market. Where there is a market, there are potential customers for your products and services. There is potential here.
I first found Twitter within the podcast community while searching for new ways to promote The Force Field. I admit I thought it rather juvenile at first and was actually astonished to find so many other people and organizations who were already connected to hundreds, and in some cases thousands of other people – often complete strangers – who were sending messages to each other. I thought it was completely bizarre, but immediately realized how powerful the concept was, considering that these social connections were virally stimulating even more connections.
I believe it helped fuel the growth of both the podcast and the web site in recent weeks.
I also discovered that many other companies and organizations have already realized the marketing potential of Twitter and are using it to promote their products and services to an entirely new space. They are using it to advertise and communicate with their customers and potential customers in a more interactive and personal way than with traditional media. Building relationships with customers in this way can potentially have a great impact on brand awareness, customer loyalty and, ultimately, the bottom line.
Best of all, it’s free, and you can’t beat free.
A couple of weeks ago I polled the Providers in the OnForce forums to find out if anyone else was thinking about using Twitter as a marketing tool for their business. Interestingly enough, 75% of those polled chose “What the heck is a Twitter?” These are folks in the IT industry, the ones who are supposedly on the cusp of technology, new forms of communication and new trends. Strange.
I view this as a potentially powerful tool for communication, marketing and support. Imagine setting up a Twitter account for your business and telling your customers about it. Suddenly they have an instant line to you when they need you – then you answer when you are ready for them. You have an instant line to them when you have a new ad or coupon to deliver or a special to promote. You and your customer have an instant line for support in a pinch.
Likewise, imagine if techs were connected to each other this way, they could support one another when in the field when a peer is in a pinch.
There likely other uses for Twitter as well that are yet to be developed. For now, the marketing potential alone is sufficient to justify an account. The question is, if it can be used as a tool to market your business, would you utilize it?
You can Twitter me @theforcefield.
http://www.twitter.com/theforcefield
