MarCom Professional

How to Twitter for Business Development….. part 4

I have had some great comments from readers to this series about Biz Dev and Twitter. In case you missed it How to Twitter part 1 ; How to Twitter part 2 ; How to Twitter part 3.

And to wrap up the series, I am going to summarise other great resources that may help you use Twitter to find more customers. 

New York Times ran an article that covers some of the same ground that I recommended. It also includes these two categories:

Engage customers. Run contests, solicit feedback and thank customers for supportive messages. Jetblue does all three. (By the way, JetBlue doesn’t identify the person or people who Twitter under its account, but best practices suggest you should.)

Provide customer service. Wesabe, a personal finance site, has long used Twitter to respond to complaints and to let customers know when it’s fixing problems. Comcast doesn’t post, but it does use Twitter to respond to customers who have complained about the company.

Chris Brogan has 50 Ideas on using Twitter for Business this includes some nice arguments both for and against using it!

Jeremiah Owyang categorises his advice into "baby steps" and "running" for the more and less sophisticated user options. I like his observations about how brands can track conversations in different media but use their corporate website to aggregate the threads. Rowperfect has added its Twitter feed to the sidebar of the blog page as a simple first step in this direction. Here is one of the comments he got.

Rubbermaid has been using Twitter for a few months. We started slow, but just last week things took a quantum leap.

I created a post that listed the professional organizers I (Rubbermaid) was following on Twitter. This in turn generated huge buzz within the professional organizer community and, BOOM! The connections became very solid. Online conversations turned into phone calls. Invites to meetings were offered. Discussions about Facebook groups started, etc..

Below is a comment from a professional organizer who summed up the events nicely.

@ProfOrganizer: @DrDeClutter Yep, @rubbermaid gave super buzz to Twittering professional organizers & linked the few of us who aren’t already pals. Yay!

He also links to Dawn Foster's Brand Plan for Twitter and Tara Hunt's Tweeting for Companies 101 She had a nice list of things to tweet about.

So plenty of reading fodder for you.

Now onto some real stuff that people have made happen [apologies to the pedants for the Americanism].

@Documentally tells me "I have probably got 80% of my work and 100% of my sleep deprivation through twitter this year."

@problogger uses Twitter to get new ideas and feedback from his readers. He recently asked

Question - if you could make one change/addition/request of Problogger.net what would it be?

And some things for the obsessives (i.e. those who are really getting into Twitter) to end with

A site that claims to log the top Twitter users worldwide Twitterholic

And an app for iPhone users Twittelator

Also posted on creativeagencysecrets.com