To Tweet or Not to Tweet? – That is the question

For people who are relatively new to Social Media there are a lot of barriers to adopting sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogging etc as a marketing channel for their business.

Some of barriers are:

• lack of time
• fear of lack of control
• overwhelmed with too much information
• don’t understand how to communicate online (conversation versus pushing sales messages)

I usually tell them: “Find out where your target audience is, and begin to build a community there”.

There are different relationships and different benefits from different sites.

Often times, Facebook is a great tool for business-to-consumers, LinkedIn is a suitable platform for business-to-business.

While I love Twitter for building new relationships, I don’t think it’s for everyone.

A person who does well on Twitter is someone who is “conversational”. Twitter requires much more than pushing sales messages out to the masses. It requires listening, jumping into conversations, asking questions and most importantly – more time than some of the other sites.

Personally, and professionally, I love Twitter. I’ve learned a lot from my Twitter friends and have connected with some amazing people I would not have met otherwise.

The community that I connect with on Twitter are supportive and collaborative. We have  online Twitter parties, provide advice and even (gasp!) get to meet in real life once in a while.

Why I say it’s not for everyone is:

• because there is less than 13% of the population using Twitter (and 20% of the people are making 80% of the tweets) and
• because Twitter requires much more time than any of the Social Media sites to build quality relationships.

You wouldn’t only go once to networking event and expect that people were going to refer business to you.  People have to get to know you, trust you and know the value of the services you provide. That doesn’t happen overnight.

But, for big business whose brands are already well-known — they really SHOULD be dedicating time to listening and engaging online. If not, they are missing out on an opportunity to learn, respond to customer service and reward people who are singing their praises. Sometimes just a simple “thank you” can be enough for a customer to feel heard (but if you can, provide coupons/discounts or more!)

Do you tweet? What do you like about it? (Are you following me at http://www.twitter.com/punchmediadotca?)

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