My test shows Twitter ‘can be’ good for business

Momentum is a wonderful thing.

Less than 12 months ago Twitter was but an interesting sideline to the social networking phenomenon, taking a back seat to its more established MySpace and Facebook.

A year later and it seems that every man and his dog is either tweeting or talking about tweeting – whether you are follower-magnet Ashton Kutcher or the leader of the free world.

While there is no question that Twitter is flavour of the year, many gigabytes of cyberspace have been transmitted about just what, if anything, it does for one’s business.

And while it may bring some tangible benefits to some businesses, how would it impact on notoriously time-poor and GFC challenged smaller enterprise?

I logged in and created a Twitter account to find out.

What resulted was three months of tweeting, keeping track of both benefits gained and invested time to truly ascertain what impact, if any, it had on my small business.

Here were my observations on the pros and cons.

Pros

1. Reduces isolation for smaller businesses
Many small business operators report feeling isolated in their SOHO office. Twitter can act as digital ‘watercooler conversation’ providing a very real way of replicating that important social interaction.

2. Helps promote new aspects of your business and create ‘viral’
If you have a product that customers enjoy hearing about, Twitter is a fantastic way of telling them about new releases, developments, as well as new promotions such as websites, blogs, video and so on.

3. Search for qualified prospects
My good friend Chris Thomas of Reseo found a benefit I’d never considerered, and that is using the ‘search’ capability at the foot of the twitter page and searching for terms that may lead to a sale. For example, searching for the term ‘shopping for cars’ yielded pages of ‘tweets’ from those who are literally shopping for cars. Yes, these are international but you get the drift…

4. Calls for suppliers or referrals
This is one of the biggest benefits of all. Twitterers often ask their followers for advice on the supply of pretty much anything. Even if you can’t supply it yourself, you may know someone who can who might return the favour. If you’re not twittering, you won’t get these calls.

Cons

1 . Yet another distraction for desk-based staff
As if Facebook, MySpace, IM, the web, etc weren’t distracting enough, Twitter provides yet another reason to be distracted from one’s work. Who’d be an employer?

2. Time and time again…
Most of us are time poor. While compared to using Facebook et al, Twitter is faster. For most of us even finding a few minutes a day to check in to Twitter is beyond us. Having said that, it only takes a few seconds to broadcast a message to potentially thousands of people, who in turn can ‘viral’ it to others.

The Upshot

So after three months of daily tweeting, re-tweeting, following and everything else to do with Twitter, what have I found?

Has there been any real benefit to my business and if so, at what cost?

I have to say that at this stage, Twitter has had very little tangible impact on my business.

Yes, it has provided a feeling of ‘keeping in touch’ and no doubt helped promote my business in ways that hitherto might not have been possible.

But I can’t point to any new business that is a direct result of Twitter, nor can I point to any productivity or process gains it has led to.

In fact the danger for many smaller organisations is the massive distraction it provides to their staff as they feel the need, and may even be addicted to, the seductive interaction with the online world that Twitter provides.

Similarly, many smaller business have their promotional strategy on ‘auto-pilot’. That is they set it up for the year and let it do its thing with much in the way of time consuming maintenance. And it’s these businesses who will find it most difficult to justify any considerable time spent experimenting with it.

But following the mantra of ‘any publicity is good publicity’, it can also be seen that Twitter can only help promote and communicate what your business is doing, which who knows, may lead to that critical sales query or important connection.

Should favour larger businesses

I suspect too that the businesses who will benefit most from Twitter are those that have resources dedicated to the marketing effort. In other words, if you are paying someone (or yourself) to carry out marketing activities, some time spent working Twitter is likely to yield a positive ROI.

At the same time though, these larger businesses could be more exposed to any risk that a tweet posted by a staff member may not reflect company policy, together with the many risks this situations presents.
So like any good thing, try Twitter out, but do it in moderation!

Craig Reardon is a leading eBusiness educator and founder and director of independent web services firm The E Team which provide the gamut of ‘pre-built’ website solutions, technologies and services to SMEs in Melbourne and beyond.

You can see how the experiment unfolded at https://twitter.com/mousethatroared

Has your business experienced some tangible benefits from Twitter? Weigh into the debate with your comment below.