Twitter for Small Business = Great Tactic

Over the past several days, we’ve seen more news on Twitter for small business come out in the press and blogosphere. For example, there’s the AdAge article “Twitter Proves Its Worth as a Killer App for Local Businesses” which has several success stories of how small businesses have won customers using Twitter. Even Twitter themselves are contemplating how to help small businesses use their platform to grow. While they are focused on analytics rather than advertising ( a good sign), Twitter is doing a great job of trying to understand and reach an important segment which will help them grow.

We see the use of Twitter with our large clients like Cisco and NetApp continuing to grow. But we are also getting more inquiries from smaller companies who don’t want to host a community, but want to use social media effectively to achieve their goals. In our discussions, we suggest using applications like Twitter, Yelp, Facebook, LinkedIn, Bebo, MySpace and others to start building their online brand and reputation. The response we get in many cases is:

“Okay, that makes sense but I don’t have anyone to run this.”

We’ve seen a small market emerge in technology to monitor social media and brand reputation (keotag &  boardtracker come to mind). But there also needs to be a new service to help small businesses use social media effectively at a price that works…and that seems to be the missing piece of the puzzle to gaining wider adoption of these tools.

It’s an issue that we’ll be working on in the next few weeks. Stay tuned.

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