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All of a Twitter: How businesses are turning tweets into dollars

This article was published in the May 2009 issues of Canary Wharf magazine and City magazine.

Image: Matt Hamm (Flickr)

Twitter's growth has been exponential over the last year with an ever increasing army of people and brands joining the service's ranks of microbloggers. The reason for its growth is undoubtedly down to Twitter's simplicity and the way in which it allows users to receive each other's updates without entering into anything approaching the social bind of a 'friendship'; the system employed by the networking behemoths Facebook and Myspace. If you're interested in what someone's saying then you can 'follow' them and hear more and when you get tired of them you can sever your ties without the slightest twinge of social guilt.

Technology businesses have naturally been some of the first and most effective to use Twitter as a platform for brand awareness and consumer engagement. Dell Outlet UK, the arm of Dell that sells its cut-price returned and refurbished computers regularly tweets about new offers and deals. This is a win-win situation as consumers get alerted to money saving offers and Dell harnesses the power of the microblog to create an exclusive club of potential customers who are privy to the best deals and are actually more likely to purchase them because of the implied scarcity of products offered only to a minority of people.

Twitter has also allowed businesses to keep track of what their customers are saying about them. 5 years ago a customer might have called or emailed their friends to tell them what terrible customer service they had received; a complaint that would have cut the company out of the loop. But now that same customer might tweet about their bad experience and, as Twitter updates are publicly viewable, the company can not only listen to the complaint but also respond to it.

Indeed, Southwest Airlines recently received a slew of free advertising for spotting a tweet by a technology journalist who was dissatisfied with the company's communication regarding his canceled flight. A representative of the airline got in touch with the journalist to smooth things out and the result was a widely read article praising Southwest Airlines' use of Twitter as a customer engagement tool that hit all the major social media news portals.

In the current employment market Twitter has also become a tool of finding work. The social media site mashable.com recently ran an article on finding a job on Twitter and reports seem to suggest that many people have been successful. With the right tweets, retweets and followers it seems like Twitter really can get you a job although this also means that those still in the market for a job should take care of what they say on Twitter as employers are now sure to be watching potential employee's accounts as closely as their blogs, LinkedIn profiles and Facebook activity.

Correctly harnessed then, Twitter can be an unrivaled tool for brand awareness, customer engagement and personal gain but all would do well to remember that Twitter now has the power to make and break reputations and businesses and it would be prudent to plan your engagement strategy before joining one of the world's fastest growing networks.

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