I seem to be getting asked the same question a lot in the past few weeks by clients, friends, and just people in general who want to pick my brain. Everyone I run into wants to know why Twitter is useful and if it is worth their time.
The truth is that Twitter is very powerful if done properly. Just recently over the Thanksgiving holiday I was part of a project called TweetsGiving which was a 2 day campaign by Epic Change to raise $10,000 for a school in Tanzania as well as get people to share and realize how much we as a whole have to be thankful for this year. The site entire campaign specifically targeted Twitter as it’s primary marketing point.
Within the first 3 hours the site had already hit the 25% mark to the fund raising goal, and after 47 hours the goal was completely met. Although there was some word of mouth and the site did get a very good number of mentions on blogs and news sites, had it not been for the use of Twitter I do not think this would have been as successful.
Twitter allows people to follow and keep up with others they are interested in, build large contact networks and reach out to those people when you need them. With TweetsGiving they began with several well know and heavily followed members on Twitter who were very interested no only in the concept of what the site was trying to do but also the impact they could have. After these people posted about it, more followed. Not only did the donations come running in but as people shared what they were thankful for it simply expanded the network of people who were seeing the messages from TweetGiving and driving more people to check it out.
In just those two days the site had over 9,000 absolute unique visitors, and over 16,000 pageviews with visits coming from around the world. This is not the only example of how you can use Twitter.
Twitter is a great source for building a brand and loyal follower group. By allowing you to post messages as often as you like, forcing you to keep those messages short, and providing a way for people to share your message with a large number of other people who may be interested you can develop quite a following.
Since the message has a character limit you do have to make sure you can get your point across in efw words. This is great at helping to narrow down and get directly to the point, with no beating around the bush or long drawn out emails.
Twitter can also help to show activity, in many cases with nonprofits and small businesses people want to know you are actually doing something. It is human nature to be skeptical but if someone sees you Tweeting several times a day with what people are doing in your organization or updates on product development then it provides a means of being more transparent easing the tensions people have.
Twitter is also a great way to get volunteers involved. By giving them a way to also promote your cause or product you are simply expanding your customer base. It is really a word of mouth campaign done over a digital age technology. Volunteers can post links to you, updates on what they read from you, and share even more about what they are doing.
A great example is for a nonprofit organization that has several satellite groups working in multiple places the volunteers on location can Tweet from a computer or even in some cases their cell phones giving people real world real time updates to the impact the organization is having.
An example on the business side would be a product development company with multiple products in testing, or even products that have been released. If you have your engineers constantly updating people on fixes, availability and testing they can see just how dedicated you are as a brand to making a solid well produced product.
The best part of Twitter is the cost. It is a free service this means the only cost of using Twitter is the 1 min it takes to have a person post to it. For those looking at a solid ROI you can get it here if you make a dedicated effort and use the right strategy for your situation. If you need help determining the right strategy for you I would suggest speaking to someone well versed in your particular market. If you need help finding someone who can help you in your field send me a message and I will help you get in the right direction for your needs.