I finally got around to reading some old RSS subscriptions and I came across the following article: Real Life Examples of Business Owners Using Social Media from Small Business Trends and I was intrigued. I really wish I could have gone to the event. It would have been nice to have learn and listen to everyone who had attended. I love the fact that this article discusses the positive ways of using Social Media and also how so many people question it.

One thing that I do agree with is that you should definitely pick a few outlets and focus on them. Make sure they fit your target market. Also, the time aspect can be a problem. You can always outsource to people who know what they’re doing, or you can make it a company project and have everyone contribute (this works really well for Blogs). The main reason why I personally love Social Media is that the company no longer is just a company, but its something more personable and approachable regardless of the medium someone would find them through.

Twitter, my new personal favorite medium, is a great tool that I find that a lot of companies are under-utilizing. There are a lot of users, and although its fairly new (not really, about a year plus old), everyone is still learning the best techniques.

@37signals is a provider for a lot of the online applications that Border7 uses. I believe that everyone of their staff is also on Twitter (I am following quite a few of them). They use their Twitter account to notify their users of any downtime on their various products, and I am notified by at least 4-5 tweets telling me so.

@LessAccounting created a website (We All Hate QuickBooks) that displays a live feed of all Tweets that mention Quickbooks. The website is unfiltered, so it shows positive and (mostly) negative comments that people are making of one of LessAccounting’s competitors. Its a genius marketing strategy in my opinion. Also, I would never have found them if it wasn’t for Twitter. I was looking for other accounting providers, and they started a discussion with me (Twitter can be a great sales tool).

Which brings me to my next point. @Freshbooks saw that I was looking at other providers, and they used Twitter as a retention tool and talked me into staying with them as well. Fortunately, I needed something from both companies that only each uniquely provided.

@Zappos (I do not follow them since I’m afraid I’ll waste my entire paychecks shopping with them) is also a prime example of how to make your company personable. Almost everyone who works for them utilizes Twitter and they are encouraged to discuss what they’re doing, what is working for them, and what is not. The CEO is the one who runs the main Twitter account (I believe, so don’t hold me to this) and they respond to people, plug products or blog posts, and all in all, just make the company that much more approachable.

And with that, if you’re a Twitter user, I would suggest following @Border7 for all the Border7 news. If you want to get to know me (do so at your own risk) you can follow me @kamylynn.

Also, if you just want to read some general demographics, refer to the recent Time’s article on Twitter.

Tags: marketing, small business trends, social media, twitter

This entry was posted on Monday, August 25th, 2008 at 10:53 am and is filed under Running a Business | . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.