I participated in a webinar this morning hosted by Marketing Experiments on the topic of Twitter For Business, or to use their title, Getting beyond the “Now What?” It was topical for us because we’ve been having some concerns that twitter is overly noisy, approximating spam a lot of the time, and potentially a time waster.
The webinar was excellent and acknowledged that Twitter is in its early stages for business use. They focused on its relative abilities to help businesses increase revenue and equity, and lower cost.
The biggest take home for us was the importance of using Twitter to help build a solid brand. The quality of the images, bio, logo, etc must reflect the direction and inspiration of the business. Examples were given of well known companies who are using Twitter well for branding and others who are not. Kodak and Fuji were given as good and bad examples of effective use. One thing which was interesting is that Microsoft’s presence on Twitter is really bad – almost non-existent. They didn’t even have a logo on their account. I bet they have someone working on that this afternoon 
Another important point was to only follow a highly targeted list appropriate to your industry. The businesses with the higher quality presences tended to have large followings but fewer followers. I guess what that means is that you are judged by the company you choose to keep!
Similarly, the quality and content of your posts is really important. If you spam a lot of noisy personal stuff about going to the bathroom and having to mow the lawn this afternoon – well that’s not going to contribute to branding your business as quality.
I felt more positive about Twitter by the end of the session – it seems like it has really valid applications in selling, marketing & branding, as well as customer service. I felt like there is an opportunity for real businesses to grow and I’m looking forward to learning more.
We really recommend Marketing Experiments. They have great webinars on many facets of online marketing and are always exploring the impacts and opportunities for businesses of all shapes and sizes. And remember – Artists are businesses too! I’ll post a link to the recorded webinar as soon as it is posted.
Can you share why Kodak and Fuji were good and bad examples? What are they doing that is different, and can you give examples of what a typical post would look like in a good and bad Twitterer?
Susan – you can listen to the audio of the seminar at http://is.gd/14wL7 That will give you some ideas. My recollection – Fuji had a bland and hard to recognize logo, their bio was unclear or non-existent, and they had made very little effort to post. The Kodak site they referred to was associated with a specific corporate exec at kodak so it had a logo and his photo – much more personalized. The bio was interesting and clear and there was an engaging series of relevant posts. Hope this helps!
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I’m interesting to learn more about twitter opportunities
I think this is a real thing.