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A Twitter Success Story

When former retailer and current small business consultant, Cinda Baxter, saw the toll that the recession was taking on small businesses across the country she came up with a simple, yet powerful concept that spiraled into a national marketing campaign called, “The 3/50 Project” which asks consumers to spend $50 a month at three independently-owned stores to help them stay in business and stimulate the economy.

While her concept is very inspiring in itself, her successful marketing campaign is also worth noting as Baxter credits much of her campaign’s success to bloggers and subscribers of free social networking sites such as Twitter who “tweeted” and “re-tweeted” links to her blog. “Twitter played an important role in the rapid growth of The 3/50 Project, building off the momentum created by my blog, unsolicited third party endorsements, and a couple of trade publications who loved the concept,” Baxter explains. “From there, things took off like a rocket.” Her project is now experiencing the Twitter phenomenon known now as the “viral effect” (aka Twitter’s ability to widely spread information incredibly quickly over its worldwide network). The 3/50 Project website just went live on March 30, and as of midnight April 6 had already received 8,658 visits from 7,524 absolute unique visitors!

Although Baxter’s campaign success also included the incorporation of many other great marketing strategies, the role that social networking sites like Twitter played in Baxter’s campaign demonstrates how social networking may help boost a well designed marketing plan’s success rate. However, maximizing the various strategies of several networking sites can take a lot of time and effort to implement. Therefore, if you are interested in trying out the social networking scene for your business and only have time to invest in working with one site, my suggestion would be to try out Twitter due to its flexibilities and current explosive growth.

Ways in Which Twitter Might Be Useful to Your Business:

1) Real-Time Interaction With People:
As “Tweeter” Naomi Pollack explains in her article, “Understanding Twitter: Why Twitter is Less Like Facebook and More Like Email,” Twitter provides the opportunity for much more immediate and interactive communication between users than do many other social networking sites.

2) Ability to Network with a Widespread Community:
Twitter allows you to choose to follow and/or be followed by anyone (within a certain ratio of followers to those you are following to discourage spamming). This opens you up to networking with people worldwide you would most likely never connect with otherwise. If nothing else, just having your followers potentially check out your website or blog from time-to-time can greatly increase your site’s hits and help increase your search engine ranking. And, if you have developed a good relationship with followers or post really interesting tweets you may be fortunate enough to have links to your site or blog spread around, like they did in Cinda Baxter’s scenario.

3) Advanced People & Information Search Capabilities:
There’s a good reason that Google is rumored to be looking into purchasing Twitter. The power of Twitter’s various search applications can be really useful for business applications, whether you are searching for people or information.

4) Increased News & Information Gathering & Distributing:
There are a multitude of large corporations, as well as television and newspapers on Twitter that you can follow to receive quick news updates and stay informed on what’s going on in your market or the world. If you are really good at networking this way and are fortunate enough to connect with reporters from these news sources via Twitter you may even be able to form connections with them and more easily promote your most prominent press releases through Twitter.

How to Incorporate Twitter Into Your Marketing Plan:

The irony of Twitter is that it is so simplistic that it is complex and can be very overwhelming at times. Question even the most avid of Twitter fans and you will likely find that they went through a “I don’t get this” phase and maybe even closed out their account at one point. Although it takes under 2 minutes to set up a Twitter account and start tweeting, really mastering Twitter and what it can do for you really takes some time. As Social Media Consultant, James Rivers, explains, to maximize their use of Twitter, people “…have to understand why they should use Twitter and the powerful long-term benefits that it can provide. In short, they have to “get” it.”

Part of the “getting it” is customizing and incorporating your own Twitter networking and communications strategy because the field is wide open on what you can do with it. You aren’t limited to using it as a marketing strategy either. Some businesses have actually come up with unique and creative uses for Twitter as a communications tool.

Another part of the successful Twitter equation is really understanding the technical capabilities of Twitter. The main Twitter set up is extremely limiting and most people end up needing to utilize one or more Twitter applications to sort through all the information they receive and make it work for them the way want. Webdesigner Depot has developed one of the most comprehensive and user-friendly guides to using Twitter in their blog that I’ve come across so far that thoroughly walks you through all the ins and outs of setting up and maximizing your Twitter account. SocialPOPstars’ Johni Louise has even created a series of great Twitter “How to” YouTube videos that can really help you get started including, “All a Flutter for Twitter” & “How to Set up Your Twitter”

While I seriously doubt using Twitter, or any other social networking site, as your only or even main marketing strategy will create the success you are looking for, these networks are free resources. So why not utilize them to the best of your ability? They could end up playing a very successful role in your marketing strategy. Just make sure you DO have a strategy in using them or they will simply become a giant waste of time very quickly.

Note From the Author: I would love to learn more about whether or not Twitter has been beneficial to your marketing plan. Feel free to leave me a comment or “tweet” me.

Related posts:

1. How to Set Up a Twitter Account & Develop Followers for Your Business