Twitter is a great tool for promoting your business, but just like any form of marketing people need a reason to engage. Promoting special offers and announcing news will only get you so far because your competition is doing exactly the same.
Local businesses used to exclusively use direct mail, flyers, and other local advertising as promotional tools. This type of one-way advertising still has it’s place as not everyone is online. But simply using the same methods of one-way advertising online is missing the point.
Twitter provides businesses with the ability to communicate directly and instantly with their customers for free – this is huge. Instead of using Twitter to only promote special offers (one-way advertising) why not use it to promote excellent customer service?
Twitter has a 140 character limit, this may seem like a restriction, but it encourages interaction as the time required to send and reply to a tweet is very short.
- Using Twitter as a channel to provide responsive customer service will add value to your Twitter followers
- Communicating with your followers is far more beneficial than simply broadcasting another special offer
- Unlike special offers, great customer service can’t be easily replicated
Most half decent smart phones these days can run Twitter, it’s free to setup and you can be quite sure many (not all) of your customers will already be using Twitter. As a way to promote your business and communicate with customers Twitter is hard to beat.