Last month we discussed different ways that your company can use Facebook as part of your marketing efforts. But Facebook is only one of the social media tools at your disposal — one of the other dominant tools in the marketplace is Twitter.

So what is Twitter? It is similar to Facebook in some respects — in both tools you set up a personal account and build lists of people to communicate with: friends or fans in Facebook, and followers in Twitter.  Both tools are designed for short, 1-2 sentence messages rather than long essays (in fact, Twitter messages have a 140-character limit).

But there are also key differences between these two tools. One of the main differences is that, while Facebook posts are oftentimes private and only visible to that person’s friends or fans (dependent on each account’s security settings, of course), messages posted on Twitter (called tweets) are usually publicly available to the world. In addition, tweets can include certain key phrases preceded by a hashtag (#), which can then be used to organize and sort the tweets. For instance, if you wanted to see what people were saying about an upcoming election, you could do a search on all tweets containing the hashtag phrases #election or #politics. There are other more everyday hashtag phrases as well, such as #amazing, or #fail.

For instance, here are some sample tweets that might be commonly seen:

• The new album from (band name) is #amazing!!!
• My lousy (brand name) laptop just broke. #fail

This publicly-accessible stream of conversations means that one of the most effective business uses of Twitter is using it as a listening tool: seeing what people are saying about your company, your products, your competitors and your industry. For instance, a home appliance company could run regular keyword searches on their company name, their product names, their competitors’ names, and more generic terms such as “broken dishwasher” or “replacing washing machine.” This allows your company to stay informed and ready to respond in case consumer sentiment toward your products suddenly shifts, for instance, or in case one of your competitors rolls out a new product or service that you need to respond to.

Regular use of Twitter as a listening tool opens up another useful application of this tool: customer service and public relations. Suppose, for instance, that a serious flaw was discovered in one of the shipments of your company’s products.  The people who bought the defective products are furious, and complain about the problems on Twitter. Other people might start re-tweeting these messages in their own Twitter accounts, and pretty soon bad news about your company is spreading like wildfire across the internet.  If your company is actively engaged with your customers on Twitter, however, you would be able to see these customers’ tweets about their faulty product, and immediately respond to them apologizing for the mistake and offering a free replacement. These people will then most likely be impressed with your prompt and personal customer service, and will have finish your conversation with an improved impression of your company in the future, rather than a negative impression. Maybe they’ll post tweets speaking highly of your company’s service, which might then be re-tweeted by others as well. Multiply this scenario several times over, and suddenly you’ve avoided lots of negative sentiment about your company spreading across the internet, and instead have positive sentiment going out instead.  In this way, Twitter’s impact on your company’s public relations process is invaluable.

These are just two of the ways that companies are incorporating Twitter into their business plans. In addition to these two examples, there are hundreds of other innovative ways that businesses can use Twitter to communicate with their company’s audience, announce new promotions, gain publicity and enhance customer loyalty. As always, the best way to learn how to best use utilize Twitter for your business is to jump in and start trying it out.

In our next article we will be writing about how to best utilize the third major social networking tool on the market: LinkedIn. In the meantime, if you have additional questions or comments about anything in this article, please feel free to contact us.

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