We’ve talked a lot about Twitter in the SMEketing Marketing Blog, but that’s just because we love it so much and we know what benefits it can bring to a small business.
So we’ve decided to put down the top 20 business benefits we think Twitter can have on a business (in no particular order):
Engage and converse with your target audience
Create brand awareness
Promote of any new offers, services, products etc
Keep up to date with industry news and developments
Promote your blog content
Find prospects – use the search function and look for people mentioning requirements for services/products you supply
Customer services – keep customers updates with any issues etc
Event management – keep delegates up to date and help them network online
Keep up to date with what your competitors are up to
Market research
Give your company a more personal feel
Online reputation management – find out what people are saying about you and react immediately
A method of gaining feedback
SEO boost/increased online footprint
Q&A tool – have a question? Your Twitter network will have the answers
HR resource – find new employees quickly and cheaply
Internal communication
Help find new suppliers and partners
Promote images via TwitPic and other Twitter based image viewers
Use Twitpolls to help make decisions, undertake research etc
There are so many other great business uses of Twitter – if you can think of anymore add them to the comments below!
Founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking
Some LinkedIn statistics (as of April 2010):
More than 65 million registered users
Covers more than 200 countries and territories worldwide
On average 36.5M people visit LinkedIn.com every month
51% male, 49% female
Average age – 35-49
47% college educated, 27% university and above
So how can you use the tools LinkedIn offer to promote your business, your products and services and any offers or events?
Members only groups can be created to provide your customers with a exclusive opportunity to network with other customers
For customers with a particular product or service interest, focused sub-groups can be set-up
You and your customers can upload photos, videos, create online polls, take part in forums, and receive email updates
Groups can be used to communicate news and start online discussion and debate
LinkedIn can also be used to promote events very effectively
Like most free social networking sites, you will get out what you put in. It can be resource intensive in terms of time, but for small businesses on a budget it can be an effective way of promotion.
If you’re interested in using LinkedIn or any other type of social media to promote your business, get in touch. We can help set you up with social media accounts, and can give you training and guidance on making the most of them. Alternatively we can completely manage all your social accounts for you!
Twitter is an extremely effective tool for promoting and managing events. If you hold any kind of events, be it seminars, webinars, exhibitions or training workshops, you can use Twitter to help ensure it is a success.
Some Twitter statistics (from April 2010)
Twitter now has 105,779,710 registered users
New users are signing up at the rate of 300,000 per day
180 million unique visitors come to the site every month
Twitter users are, in total, tweeting an average of 55 million tweets a day
Twitter’s search engine receives around 600 million search queries per day
So how can you use Twitter to promote your event?
Depending on the type of event you are holding, choose to either use your main corporate Twitter account, or create a new account – purely focused on just this event (which might be the best choice if you have an event which is reoccuring)
Create a Twitter hashtag unique to each event and use this in each tweet
Encourage delegates to update their own Twitter feeds with tweets about the event using this hashtag
This hashtag measn that anybody at your event, or interested in your event can instantaneously see what you, your delegates and other interested parties are doing and saying
Twitter can also be used to provide mini-updates for one-on-one delegates
Use Twitter as a way to inform event participants of the latest event updates/changes
Include tweets containing links to new information, advice, tools and resources on your website
Use Twitter to instantly communicate important messages and ‘calls to action’ to their delegate/customer base
Delegates can subscribe to your Twitter feed or your hashtag search result via mobile or RSS for instant notification
Twitter’s social nature, combined with the ability to create instant updates and announcements makes it a perfect took to keep delegates up to date with the latest event news. Used wisely it can have a real impact on the success of your events.
May is here – the sun has been shining throughout April and it has put us here at SMEketing in a wonderful mood. So because we love the sunshine and because we enjoy helping small businesses succeed in social media, we are launching our Facebook/Twitter offer again.
We are offering to create a Twitter and Facebook Business Page for you, for the reduced price of £120 – all in!
Add all relevant information – logo, website, email, telephone, about us etc..
We will populate your wall with up to twenty posts
We will add up to five events that you may be hosting/attending
We will add up to five photo albums, populated with your photos/images (limit to 10 photos per album, or 50 photos overall)
We will provide you with a ‘How To’ guide, explaining how to manage your Facebook Business Page, and what kind of information you should be adding
We will then link your Facebook page to your Twitter account – so any new Facebook updates will automatically be posted on your Twitter account, with a link back to your new Facebook page.
All the above is based on the information you provide us. We have a limit of only ten and this offer is only valid in May 2010.
You can order now – we require payment before any work is undertaken. You can contact us and pay via BACS or alternatively, pay via PayPal now; click on the PayPal logo below:
For more information on Facebook and Twitter, read these posts:
Here are two fantastic videos that present some incredible statistics about social media and the Internet in general:
Social Media Revolution
Or is it the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution? This video details out social media facts and figures that are hard to ignore. This video is produced by the author of Socialnomics.
Years to Reach 50 millions Users: Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
% of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%
The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because we no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook…daily.
JESS3 – The State of The Internet
JESS3 designed and animated this for the JESS3 lecture at AIGA Baltimore in Feb 2010
1.73 Billion Internet users worldwide
90 Trillion Emails Sent in 2009
81% of Emails were Spam
126 Million Blogs on the Internet
27.3 Million Tweets Per Day
Faceboook serves 6 million pages per minute
4 Billion photos hosted by Flickr
182 Videos watched on average per month (per user)
We all hate January – it’s cold (especially this January! Brrr!!), the festive season is all over and the fun and frolics of Christmas and New Year are now firmly set as a few extra inches round our waistlines. So for this reason, SMEketing have decided to launch a new offer – limited to just January 2010, and the first 10 people that apply!
We are offering to create a Twitter and Facebook Business Page for you, for the reduced price of £120 – all in!
What your Twitter account will include:
A Twitter logo created based on your existing corporate logo
Bespoke background created (to include contact details and about us summary)
A Twitter ‘bio’ created with the aim of a) getting people to follow you and b) luring people to your main site
Follow 100 relevant people based on a criteria you set
Create up to five Twitter lists for you
A ‘How To Guide’ informing you how to use Twitter to boost your business effectively
What your Facebook Business Page will contain:
We will create your page for you
Add all relevant information – logo, website, email, telephone, about us etc..
We will populate your wall with up to twenty posts
We will add up to five events that you may be hosting/attending
We will add up to five photo albums, populated with your photos/images (limit to 10 photos per album, or 50 photos overall)
We will provide you with a ‘How To’ guide, explaining how to manage your Facebook Business Page, and what kind of information you should be adding
We will then link your Facebook page to your Twitter account – so any new Facebook updates will automatically be posted on your Twitter account, with a link back to your new Facebook page.
All the above is based on the information you provide us. We have a limit of only ten and this offer is only valid in January 2010. If you’ve missed out on this offer, please get in touch anyway and we can arrange to create a Facebook Business page or Twitter account for you at our usual rate.
You can order now – we require payment before any work is undertaken. You can contact us and pay via BACS or alternatively, pay via PayPal now!
For more information on Facebook and Twitter, read these posts:
A lot of the posts here on the SMEketing Small Business Blog are regarding social media – Twitter, Facebook, blogging etc. That’s not just because it’s a service we offer – it’s because the way people use the Internet, and more importantly, consumer behaviour, is changing.
It used to always be about interruption marketing – adverts interrupting your favourite TV show, every other page in a magazine being an advert, adverts on the radio offering car insurance and local double glazing, pop ups jumping up from websites running around the page whilst you try to find the X to close it down…. you get what I mean. Marketing was all about interruption – getting in the consumers way. Did we ask for Coronation Street to be split into two halves with 3 minutes of adverts in the middle? No we didn’t. Luckily nowadays, we don’t have to put up with it anymore. We can fast forward through adverts on TV, install spam blockers and pop up blockers to get rid of those pop ups and spam emails. No longer do we have no choice over having to endure irrelevant marketing rot.
So marketers need to change the way they promote their products and services. One popular stream of thought is all about content – providing content to consumers when they want, where they want. If a young lady is online, if searching in Google for ‘red ladies bikes’ then you need to make sure that your bike website gets found in Google for that search term. That young lady may also go on Twitter, and say that ‘I’m looking for a new bike – it’s got to be red, can anyone recommend a shop?’ – again, you need to make sure you are there to answer that tweet.
Additionally, people now use the Internet to research purchases. They don’t go to Comet and ask the spotty teenager behind the till for advice, they go online and look at reviews from people who are just like them, who have bought the same printer, used it and have now formed an opinion; an opinion which they post online which is available for the whole world to see. Even my Granny, who doesn’t even have the Internet knows that online is the best place to get product advice – when she wanted a new DVD player earlier this year she called me up and asked me to go online and check the reviews of the one she wanted! The power of a positive review in Amazon is amazing – in the same way that a bad review can be disastrous. So businesses need to also monitor social media; know what is being said about products you sell, your industry, and more importantly – you!
These are just a couple of examples, but eConsultancy have some social media statistics to really bring home the fact that your small business NEEDS to be participating in social media marketing – if you’re not, you’re in danger of become an irrelevant dinosaur:
Social networks and blogs are the 4th most popular online activities online, including beating personal email. 67% of global users visit member communities and 10% of all time spent on the Internet is on social media sites.
If Facebook were a country, it would be the fourth most populated place in the world. This means it easily beats the likes of Brazil, Russia and Japan in terms of size.*
80% of companies use, (or are planning to use), LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees during the course of this year. The site has just celebrated reaching its 45-millionth membership.
Around 64% of marketers are using social media for 5 hours or more each week during campaigns, with 39% using it for 10 or more hours per week.
It took radio 38 years to reach 50 million listeners. Terrestrial TV took 13 years to reach 50 million users. The internet took four years to reach 50 million people… In less than nine months, Facebook added 100 million users.
Wikipedia currently has more than 13 million articles in more than 260 different languages. The site attracts over 60 million unique users a month and it’s often hotly debated that the information it contains is more reliable than any printed Encyclopedia.
The most recent figure of blogs being indexed by Technorati currently stands at 133 million. The same report into the Blogosphere also revealed that on average, 900,000 blog posts are created within a single 24-hour period.
It’s been suggested that YouTube is likely to serve over 75 billion video streams to around 375 million unique visitors during this year.
The top three people on Twitter (Ashton Kutcher, Ellen DeGeneres and Britney Spears) have more combined followers than the entire population of Austria.*
According to Socialnomics, if you were paid $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia, you would earn $156.23 per hour.
The online bookmarking service, Delicious, has more than five million users and over 150 million unique bookmarked URLs.
Since April this year, Twitter has been receiving around 20 million unique visitors to the site each month, according to some analytical sources.
Formed in 2004, Flickr now hosts more than 3.6 billion user images.
Universal McCann reports that 77% of all active internet users regularly read blogs.
So social media is here to stay. If you don’t have a blog on your site, aren’t using Twitter, and don’t have a Facebook Business Page then please come and talk to us at SMEketing. For the month of November, we are offering you the chance to have a Facebook Business Page created for just £60 – get one before the offer runs out!
Engage and converse with your target audience
Twitter is an extremely effective tool for promoting and managing events. If you hold any kind of events, be it seminars, webinars, exhibitions or training workshops, you can use Twitter to help ensure it is a success.
We all hate January – it’s cold (especially this January! Brrr!!), the festive season is all over and the fun and frolics of Christmas and New Year are now firmly set as a few extra inches round our waistlines. So for this reason, SMEketing have decided to launch a new offer – limited to just January 2010, and the first 10 people that apply!
A lot of the posts here on the SMEketing Small Business Blog are regarding 
