Are you still using the traditional ways to market your product to your customer?
If yes, then I think either you’re afraid of change or afraid to learn. Come on guys, everyone is using social media to expand their business. Coca-cola, Sony, Honda, Air Asia and even Sen Heng to name a few are now using twitter.
I’ve did a research and was shocked to find only 28,310,000. of Malaysian user on Twitter vs Malaysian’s total population of 28,310,000

[Photo credit: GreyReview.com]
Other than Facebook, twitter is helpful to promote and grow your business.
Some business owners might think twitter is a total waste of valuable time and twittering takes up lots of their employees productive time. This isn’t true if company hires a social media person to execute online marketing communication plans and to create brand awareness. By doing so, it ensure queries are attended to and this could increase their product or services presence.

Why business should use twitter

Branding

A company’s brand is very important. It doesn’t matter whether your company’s product are unhealthy or not. People don’t really care because majority are brand conscious.
Twitter helps build your business reputation too, it’ll help you grow your customers more often across the globe. Good news is that you could brand in whichever way you wanted, and there are people watching and following you, including your followers’s follower.
Some ways you can brand your business are by

Promoting your employee stories, sharing links, non-business tweets, giving advice and help, posting pictures of your company annual dinner and others

It helps to shape your business for your customers, suppliers and partners to have a better understand of your company’s values and employees.
These two way communications, not only deepen a genuine relationship for future business deals, it could also attract potential customers if you constantly tweets with them. As a result, you will gain much more loyal clients. A happy and loyal customers will help your business grow even further.

Research Purpose

Market survey helps to gather information about age, gender, location, likes, dislikes and lots more for your business to have a better grasp of targeting your item where it sells the most. Now, using twitter, you could get an instant feedback from user themselves. When there is instant communication, user will be much more happier to provide an in depth feedback and opinion on your products and services. if there’s a complain, twitter will enable quick action to be taken to solve it. And if a customer feels great satisfaction, you’ll be notified via twitter. A market research report will only provide you with statistic, graphs, figures but twitter will provide more, a real live tweets with the customer and  getting an honest feedback.
Not to forget about research on who are your competitors. For eg: what are they offering, their strategies, promotions, sales and so on. You could obtain first hand information on your competitors. This could mean your marketing plan is outdated and you may now proceed to order a few pizza and coffee for OT aka Over Time – because now you will need to do some brainstorming to come up with a whole new idea.

Learning and Helping To Expand Business

Think about this, followers+followers+followers … and so on
This means twitter can help you grow your business by just following people. The more followers you have, the more potential customers you will have. Because it’s a two way communication, a business can also learn from those you followed as well as those following you. It could help you discover new stuff and keep abreast with latest updates and news. Well at least, you know you’re product is still on the Top 10 list.
Apart from learning, customer service is also important. Olden ways of customer service is 1 to 1, but using twitter enhance 1 to many. You could use twitter to reply customer’s question and could be seen by all your followers who might also have the same questions. Isn’t is great?

Notification and alert

Twitter  enable business to easily notify their upcoming product or services. This can be done by notifying their partners, suppliers, group via twitter for a seminar and talks about their new products. Journalist and newspress will be alerted at the same time to join the meeting at the venue. This attract more media attention and increase more awareness, including bloggers to help create more crowdeyes to your brand.
Coupon, special deals and promotions of a products can be easily downloaded and visible to everyone via twitter notification, therefore making more sales.

Internal communication

It’s great to know about your staff’s life tweets about his/her likes and dislikes and stress level from her work, life and relationship. If only bosses know about how his employee’s day or if only you understand what ticks your supervisor up the ceiling board. Twitter is again a great way to communication with top management right down to the bottom level of a company. It helps each and everyone to know what sort of work each staff are doing and this strengthen relationship of their staffs.
This will eliminate “I am doing much more than him, he’s just plain lazy, coz I don’t see him doing anything”
Lastly, companies should know how to use Twitter properly otherwise you could be helping your competitor.

It’s Twitter A Useful Business Tool Or A Total Waste of Valuable Time

Some useful links

• Search if someone talking about you from Twitter Search
• Twitter 101′, a web-based tutorial aimed at business users.

Case Study
One of the most famous business Twitter users is Dell, which said that $9m of its 2009 sales came directly through Twitter and Facebook combined. It has been argued that smaller businesses also benefit from using Twitter, since they can compete on equal terms with larger businesses within the Twitter platform. In the UK, a survey indicated that 17% of small British businesses were using Twitter, mainly to attract new customers. [wikipedia:Twitter]