13
aug
2007
Annika Lidne

Twitter for businesses

How does your organisation reach out to your employees, customers and general public today? Press releases? Updates on your web site? Blog posts? SMS?

For certain organisations, microblogging services like Twitter can be a commercially sound alternative. Here's the why:

  • Twitter is free
  • Twitter is a quick read with its limit of 140 characters, ensuring necessary information only.
  • Twitter can be used by anybody, all over the world.
  • Twitter is unobtrusive. Each user decides who and how they want to 'follow' (i.e. access your information)
  • Twitter offers several ways for people to connect
    • On a web page
    • Through Instant Message (IM)
    • By SMS to your cell phone
    • By news feed (RSS)
    • Through desktop clients like Twitterrific
    • Through various widgets and social networks like Facebook
  • Updates can be public or kept private

Free SMS updates

So, how can this be beneficial for you and your organisation?

For the public sector the benefits are obvious: Want to inform the citizens of a city about delayed trains, road work or fires? With Twitter you can push that information to those who are interested, and those who find this information essential can get the updates by SMS to their mobile phone without any SMS costs for your organisation. One organisation who uses Twitter this way is The Los Angeles Fire Department.

To set it up, you simply supply a link to your Twitter page from your web site or any other information material together with a explanatory text of how it works. Of course, each user needs to set up their own Twitter account if they not already have one, but that is free and takes about 30 seconds if you're slow.

Update Twitter in a variety of simple ways

It is equally simple for people in your organisation to update your Twitter account. You can do it from you Twitter account page (se the picture), by SMS:ing from a mobile phone, by instant message if your organisation uses it or by e-mail through TwitterMail, as well as through a host of widgets and social networks.

Commercial use

Microblogging services are not advertising channels. Spamming the public timeline (or front page) with short ads are likely to only cause irritation and badwill.

Using Twitter to further your company's relationship with its customers is however another thing entirely. You can post important notices, information about updates of your products and services, point to opportunities for bargains and great deals or use it for live commentary on an event that people inside and outside of the company can follow.

The important question is to ask yourself is this useful information that will help our customers?

Slowing the e-mail flood

A major problem in many organisations, is the mountain of e-mail that piles up every day. One way of stopping a part of those e-mails, is by removing the internal general messages — 'Who wants to have lunch?', 'Read this great article...', 'Colleague X is home sick today' — and use Twitter as a bulletin board. It may not be ideal for a big company, but for small businesses or teams, it's great. If you want to keep your office chatter private, you turn on the privacy function and only people who you actively authorize, can see your tweets.

Read more

If you have other creative uses of Twitter in business, please add them in the comments.

London Underground image by Fishmonk / StockExchange

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