Bill Liao: Twitter – way beyond a mere promotional tool

Twitter has many uses in that it can give you an insight into what is going on amongst the people you follow yet most companies try and fail at using Twitter as a promotional tool. This is a mistake as Twitter is far more effective as a research tool.

For instance if you created an anonymous twitter account and followed all the employee of your biggest competitor even the geo-location data could provide you with invaluable insights.

Far less cloak and dagger is the process of testing messages using the request to please ReTweet. Asking people what they think of your message is far more productive than simply spamming Twitter and if people ReTweet your message, then they are much more enrolled in it. This means you can do basic market testing using Twitter for free.

If you are desperate to do promotional Tweets then consider using questions and providing insights and leave your promotional message as almost an afterthought. Frankly you do not want the largest number of people seeing your tweets, you want people to see a promotional tweet who are looking for information about your product or service.

So give away a lot of useful information about your industry or sector or the whole constellation of products and you are more likely to get real followers who are interested in your business.

If you judiciously follow people who have followings and make useful, insightful and supportive comments, you are much more likely to build a quality following that you can then leverage to do everything from market research to product testing.

Twitter may be struggling to find its own business model and it has so many uses that it is probably worth paying for and I would suggest to them, that they create a subscription service that simply allows people who subscribe to more easily manage their followers by having access to a tool, that can help them remove spammers from their followers.

In any case Twitter can be a powerful way to improve you business and its is free to use, so why not use it? Just make sure you do not become a spammer.

(Bill Liao/news.ch)