Six Ways Twitter Has Helped My Business

As the owner of a small business, Twitter has:

1. Raised my profile among my target audience

Like putting up a poster the corner store, or placing a banner over a main street, maintaining a credible Twitter presence does, in some way, make you more visible among the Twitter community – or at least among those who choose to follow you. There are ways of finding out approximately how your profile is being raised – tools such as Twitter Counter and Hootsuite provide useful ways of assessing your clout. However, you need to keep in mind what you are actually looking for: awareness, not leads or sales.

Since about 70% of tweets are routinely ignored or not read at all, it is important to keep a sense of perspective on this awareness raising. That said, regular, relevant updates that are interesting, human, informative or engaging do, over time, cause your business to be known.

That’s not the same as sales, of course, but it’s a useful commodity nonetheless.

2. Resulted in a link swap

Because my own business focuses on a hyper local geographical market, I tend to follow people and businesses on Twitter that are based in my immediate neighbourhood. Many of my followers are also very local.

One such business recently got in touch and asked if they could include some information about my business on their web site, with an inbound link. I was happy to oblige, and as a favor, included a short article about them in my monthly newsletter which goes out to my 100 local families.

There was a natural overlap in terms of the kind of clients we work with, even though we are in totally different industries, and Twitter enabled a mutually beneficial contact to be made.

3. Produced an invite to a birthday party

A local politician, with whom I have discussed education, science and politics on-line over the months, sent me  a direct message out of the blue to invite me to his birthday bash at a local media centre in the city centre. As well as being a fun evening in itself, I also met some of the great and the good from the local political scene, where we discussed, predictably, education, science and politics.

This was the first time I had been invited to an offline event by a person I had met on-line. (And, yes, I did follow my children’s advice to let a grown up know where I was going in case of “stranger danger”!)

4. Informed me of my competitors

My own field is in the world of supplementary education. As such, Twitter lets me keep up to date with the ethos and plans of others within that field. This knowledge can help my thinking about marketing, retention and other aspects of ensuring that my own business is both attractive to potential clients and maintains good retention with existing ones. 

5. Built in-bound traffic

Those who use Twitter only for sharing links to their own web site will eventually learn that many would-be followers are put off by this self-promoting approach.

That said, links to your own site, if done appropriately and occasionally, can result in more page views, which can result in more enquiries. At key times of year in my own business cycle, this can be a useful supplement to other forms of search engine optimisation.

The key, I think, is to keep this aspect of Twitter in perspective and to avoid doing too much direct self-promotion.

6. Provided me with industry-relevant news and opinion

As well as following local people, businesses and organisations, I also follow a number of general education news sites. BBC education, for instance is great for UK news in this field. Parent Pages provides a more general supply of news and views from the school gate, while specialists such as Autism Classroom give unique insight into areas of specialist education theory and practice.

This awareness is very useful to me when I am thinking about the families and children I work with week in and week out, and those who enquire for the first time about the services I offer.

Sometimes there is information that can by used directly to help explain why you do what you do. A recent example was a tweeted link to an article that explained the concern a number of neurologists have about the drawbacks of using tablets such as the iPad as primary learning tools. The scientists were claiming that the ultra-high definition of the devices actually causes the brain to work less hard, and thus retain less of what was read.

I found this insight interesting, as my own organization has only ever used pencil and paper for its student’s daily study. It is affirming to know that there is a neurological and educational basis for this traditional approach. 

Image via CrunchBase

In summary, these six tangible benefits take us to the heart of what Twitter is and what it is not. It is not an advertising platform – like a facebook ad, for instance. Nor is its primary purpose to create direct sales (though I’m sure there are some who are using it is this way with certain products). Instead, if we see Twitter for what it truly is – a social network – then as business owners we can share and receive the benefits that such a network can offer. These may not include direct sales, but a host of other benefits make Twitter a useful networking tool for the small business owner.