Social Media

Micro Blogging

When talking about micro-blogging it’s impossible not to talk about the recent phenomenon that is Twitter. Whether you are a fan of Twitter or you’re more of the opinion that it’s a bunch of people who’s time would better be spent elsewhere telling anyone who will listen the about every minute detail of their mundane lives, there’s no question that it’s power can be harnessed and used very effectively for almost any business out there.

My personal tactics when it comes to conducting business on Twitter is to conduct a few searches of keywords that best describe your product and take a look at who’s tweeted about them, from there you can begin following these people in the hope that they will follow you back (thus exposing them to everything that you tweet about thereafter), or you can send them a direct message / tweet. The level of personal communication that it can offer to the masses is unrivaled, heres an example of a situation when using Twitter can really help the way a company is viewed by its customers.
Imagine John, owner of John’s Hardware Store conducts a search one morning for those searching for ‘Johns Hardware’ there he finds one from the evening before from a lady named Caroline;

“Went into town to buy some nails from John’s hardware store today, was shut! on a Saturday! not going there again – too unreliable”

John sees this and reacts immediately;

“Hi Caroline, I’m sorry for the inconvenience caused by my store being closed yesterday, it was my birthday so I closed up early, hope to see you in there sometime this week.”

Suddenly the situation has swung and Caroline is now infinately more likely to return to John’s than she was before receiving the short message (140 characters max) from John. John has managed to personally reach out and make a connection with a potential customer. Now that was only a small scale business operation that John was running but large companies can also benefit from the one on one communication, whether it be UPS answering questions on tracking packages or the well chronicled success story of Zappos.

Programmes / Software

In terms of business use Tweetdeck is almost unparalleled, its ability to stack those you are following into neat groups and conduct detailed searches make it a great choice for any Twitter user. Unfortunately it does eat a lot of memory when running and it’s not the most aesthetically pleasing. Twirl is a decent program although without much of a search option and no ability to view others profiles without opening a browser it is perhaps a little too light for business use. If you are using a Mac my favourite app has got to be Tweetie for Mac (right) it looks great, performs quick and detailed searches, capable of updating themselves in realtime, and is very simple to use.

Applications for Twitter are available on all sorts of different platforms, whether they be mobile phones, pcs, macs even mp3 players!

If you wish to follow my updates on Twitter I can be found @gdjones83.