I’m at the Social Media Strategies Conference in San Francisco. Yesterday Twitter was mentioned often so I offered to present some business cases for using it. You can watch the conference being live streamed.

Twitter has become a valuable tool for business use. There are so many opportunities to leverage it’s capabilities in a  way that is relevant & provides value.

  • Customer Relations
  • Crisis Communications
    • opportunity to respond immediately before it escalates to blogs & other channels
  • Crowd Sourcing
    • product development,
    • survey customer satisfaction
  • Build Brand & Communications
    • offer assistance – How can we help you? @ChrisBrogan style
    • brand presence
  • Lead Generation
    • new markets
  • Customer references – star items – refer people to the URL of favorites
    • I made one for Techrigy SM2
    • how to create it
      • use search.twitter.com to search for pertinent tweets
      • open tweet & star them which will propogate the favorites
  • Announce new services, coupons & information
    • @digitalscrap
    • no push marketing please
  • Professional Networking

Laura Fitton @pistachio has a comparison chart for the various microblogging platforms.

This has replaced my Google Reader for RSS feeds. By monitoring the tweets in my topic area (ex: social media monitoring and my own name including misspellings) they gather the latest URL’s pertinent to my area of interest

If you’re just getting started with Twitter I have a post, Twitter 101, with links to resources for getting started. I also provide consulting in the areas of social networking & branding. Feel free to email me at conniebensen @ gmail.com

And definitely follow me on Twitter!  @cbensen

What business value does Twitter provide you with? And what are your success stories?

Here’s  a book that’s soon to be published that has my endorsement – I’ve read parts of it. (It’s written by a Minnesotan, so it has to be good! @jojeda )

Twitter Means Business: How Microblogging can Help or Hurt Your Company