Should You Use Twitter for Your Business?

Posted April 13th, 2009 by Tem Balanco

Twitter is a great new free micro-blogging service that allows you to broadcast your thoughts to followers in quick, 140 character chunks. As a user, you can follow people or companies and get real-time updates.

140 characters may seem kind of small, but that is the great thing about this service, it forces you to be succinct in your thoughts.

More and more businesses are starting to use Twitter. Companies like Comcast, Whole Foods, Delta Airlines and many more are using Twitter in various ways including promotion, customer service and branding.

At OneWebHosting, we are still thinking about ways we can effectively use Twitter to serve our customers.

For now, we feel it is a great compliment to our blog and an effective customer service tool.

You can follow us here: http://www.twitter.com/OneWebHosting

Here are some ways Twitter can benefit your business:

1. Use Twitter for Promotions

You can use your business Twitter account to “tweet” last minute discounts or promotions to your followers. The key idea is it is real-time, followers can get the promotions on their phone (should they choose) and this can spur sales.

2. Use Twitter for Customer Service

Chances are you have a toll-free number, a business email address, so too can you use Twitter as a customer service tool. We are looking at using Twitter to deliver real-time server updates, tips and suggestions, much like we do with our blog. Think about ways your business can benefit from this real-time communication to followers of your account.

3. Use Twitter for Competitor Search

Twitter has a great search feature located at http://search.twitter.com. You can search for keywords that pertain to your business or your brand to see what people are saying. You can use this for ideas and inspiration on how to improve your business. You can also search to see how competitors are using Twitter for their businesses.

So, Twitter may or may not make sense for your business, but I thought I would share our thoughts on it.

If you start using Twitter for your business and want to share your thoughts, let us know!