another reason accounting marketers can’t ignore twitter.
according to market researchers warrillow & co. at the corporate executive board, most marketers in the small business segment have spent the last few years searching for profitable applications of social media in their advertising campaigns; many to no avail. home grown social networks have proven to be expensive to build and short lived in their users’ engagement. established social networks have the small business membership in scale, but few have been able to engage facebook or myspace users in legitimate marketing dialogues. who would have guessed the answer may be twitter?
we asked small business owners about their preferred usage of social media, with options ranging from gathering information to business networking to problem resolution. twitter blew away traditional social networks on the topic of finding promotions and discounts. in the bulk of the small business market (generation x and baby boomer owners), business owners were seven times more likely to use twitter to find deals than social networks. in geny business owners, this ratio jumped to 35 to 1 in favor of twitter.
the transactional nature of twitter translates better as a marketing channel than the more personal and closed dialogue prevalent in social networks. better still, marketing through twitter can be achieved at a fraction of the cost of social networks.
here are three tips to consider as your company starts to experiment on twitter:
- dedicate a resource. intuit and infusionsoft are two front runners in on twitter in small business and both have a position (or portion of a position) dedicated to tweeting. expertise is required in creating succinct thoughts in under 140 characters and a single source helps create consistency in your company’s voice.
- differentiate twitter accounts. infusionsoft and intuit also use multiple twitter accounts to separate out information and exchanges. both delineate customer service vs. general information/sales tweets; intuit goes a step further and uses an “intuitdeals†account specifically for promotions.
- be responsive, not verbose. the power of twitter is generating interest with a quick and powerful message; the 140 character limit is there for a reason! resist the urge to create a high volume of tweets – instead, get a few interesting posts out per day and then be ready to react to and engage your followers.
if you’ve been struggling with the roi hurdle for social networking, take a look at twitter. there are more small business owners looking for your marketing than you might have thought!