FreshNetworks Blog

Twitter is a great way to reach and engage people online. Many people think that Twitter is a number’s game. That the more people you follow, and the more people that follow you, the better. This can sometimes be true, it very much depends on what you want to achieve with social media. For many small businesses, Twitter can be a great way to engage niche or smaller groups that you might never otherwise have been able to, or been able to afford to, reach.

Twitter works well with large groups but it can be particularly powerful with small groups. Imagine you are a small firm of accountants in a large city. You have a certain set of potential customers but there are people that are never going to be right for you – either because they are too small, too big, too spread out or for other reasons. Any business knows its target customer base and then wants to find ways to reach out to them.

Twitter lets you target these people via shared content. Taking this small accountancy firm as an example, their customers will all share some things in common. They are all likely to be in the same region, of a similar size and potentially in the same industry. They are all facing some of the same issues and our accountancy firm will help them all in similar ways. Twitter lets you bring people together who share similar issues like this.

Small businesses like this can start using Twitter, not to tell us what’s happening in their office (to be fair there is only so much of interest to the outside world there) but to talk about these issues. Provide a small but powerful resource of links to news stories, events, discussions or pieces of advice on these topics. Then start to promote it. Run your feed of your tweets on your website and in the email signatures for all your employees, put the details on your business cards and your notepaper and other marketing touchpoints. And talk to people about what you’re doing. If you meet potential customers tell them you bring together issues that might be of interest to them on Twitter and send them your way.

Slowly but carefully you will start to build a following of people who are interested in these issues. And if you have chosen issues that are of interest to and unite your target customer base you will be beginning to engage new customers. You will be providing  a real service to them and have a reason to speak to them, in our example, about your accountancy services too.

You can read all our posts on social media for small businesses here

It is important for any business to keep up-to-date on what people are saying about them, their competitors and the market they are in. Social media monitoring can play an important role here – letting you observe and then analyse what people are saying about these topics online and in social media. For small businesses this can be a powerful tool for research and for competitor intelligence.

We’ve previously posted a list of free social media monitoring tools, and how you can use tools like Twitter Lists to help keep a track of what is being said about you online. There is a lot that can be done here and setting up some simple monitoring tools is something that any small business should do. For free you can learn what people are saying right now about you, your competitors and the market you are in.

Imagine a small but growing emergency plumbing business that operates in a large city. You have a handful of competitors from one-man-bands to big plumbing firms. You are interested in what your customers are saying about you, about them and also about the plumbing needs that they have. Monitoring online can help you begin to understand better your competitors and your customers’ needs for minimal effort and no real cost. The key is to choose your keywords carefully. In this instance you could choose your own brand name and the name of the plumbers that work with you, your competitors and some key products you work with or services you offer. You might also choose to look for some bigger terms and topics concerned with DIY and other related issues.

Monitoring terms in this way is a useful mechanism for knowing what is going on and what is being said. Seeing when people refer to you, or the plumbers who work for you, and then knowing if they are happy or not with you. This gives you the information you need to change things, react if appropriate or just know that people are spreading the word about the good work that you have done. You can also gain competitive information on your competitors in the same way and start to learn where they are strong and weak.

But social media monitoring will help you in other ways. One example would be to help you develop new products and services. By monitoring what people in your area are saying about their DIY or plumbing needs, or telling their stories of what happened to them when things went wrong at home you will be able to start to explore and investigate potential new areas where you could help. Simple, free tools offer the chance for you to be more informed and then give you information for you to make the most of.

Social media monitoring is a powerful tool for any business or brand, large or small. One of the benefits of social media and online communities is that what people say is visible to others. When people talk about you, your competitors or their needs you can see this. And you can use this information to act and improve your own business.

You can read all our posts on social media for small businesses here

At FreshNetworks we work with a lot of large brands and organisations, helping them to use social media and online communities to engage their customers, stakeholders and other people. Small businesses often think that they don’t have the resources or the demand for a social media agency or to even need to engage their customers and other online. This is very often not true, in fact more often than not the opposite is the case.

Small businesses can benefit hugely from using social media to engage people online. It can help them to reach people in a very cost effective manner. It can let them have a presence online that is bigger than their size might suggest they are. And it can let them have a voice and share their opinions and knowledge on subjects relevant to their products and services.

We’ve written before about how any business can get started in social media, about the four steps any brand should do when they are getting started in social media:

• Step One:  Do you know what people are saying about you? Buzz tracking, social media monitoring, the power of understanding who is talking about you where and why, and some great free tools for any brand to use
• Step Two: What do you want to achieve? Working out your brand’s aims and objectives (and making these measurable) is the single most important factor in a successful social media strategy. Do this before you think about technology.
• Step Three: Have a go and experiment with social media Once you have clear objectives that are measurable it’s time to get going. Try things out and experiment, but make sure you do them where you know you will have the greatest chance of achieving these aims and engaging the people you want to engage.
• Step Four: Track and evaluate the success you are having When you are using social media tools it is essential that you are measuring and tracking your performance against these aims. Measurement is critical and assessing the benefit you are having will help you to refine and improve your strategy overall.

The same is true for small businesses, they should know what is being said about them, plan what they want to achieve and then experiment and measure success. Over the next week, we are going to discuss four different tools that small businesses can use. All of them free and all helping in different ways to meet different aims and objectives. From blogging to  Foursquare we’ll give real practical tips on social media for small businesses.

You can read all our posts on social media for small businesses here

This week has seen Twitter launch Twitter 101; a guide for businesses of how to use Twitter. We’ve looked before at how organisations can use Twitter, and this guide covers the basics as well as showcasing a few cases studies of what some businesses are doing.

The guide itself is part a how-to guide, part an explanation of what Twitter is and part a set of ideas and examples. The fundamental recommendations from Twitter can be summarised in four simple steps

1. Listen to what people are saying about your brand on Twitter
2. Set up your own presence and be honest about who you are
3. Follow people that are relevant to you
4. Respond to discussions about your brand and business

This approach of listening first is a great way of starting to develop a strategy of how your business should use Twitter. Once you know what people are saying about you, what issues they are discussing and what problems they raise, you will know what kind of responses might be expected of you when you get to stage 4. But I would suggest an additional stage that builds on this information. Getting your strategy right.

There is a strong argument for brands being on Twitter. Experimenting and finding out what works for you. However, you will get most success if you take a step back first and think why you are doing this. What are your business aims and what do you hope to achieve. How will you measure your success and evaluate if you are getting out of your use of Twitter what you hoped?

This needn’t be a lengthy and complex process but it is one worth doing. It helps to focus what you are doing and gives the use of Twitter a real focus and direction. Different businesses will be in different situations, with different business needs and different strategic aims. Think about where you are and where you want to go and then brainstorm how you might use Twitter to help you get there.

Innovation is great and social media is a fantastic medium through which to innovate. But a little bit of focus and strategy will help turn this innovation into something that you can evaluate. Something that you can assess and something that you can improve on.

Only if you think about what you want to achieve will you really be able to measure what you have done and the success it has brought your business. Then you’ll be able to add to the great case studies from the likes of Dell and Pepsi that are listed in Twitter 101.

Download the Twitter 101 slides

Some more reading

• Twitter 101 for Business – official case studies, tips and downloads (nickburcher.com)
• Twitter Launches “Twitter 101″, Step One Of The Business Plan (techcrunch.com)
• Hints of many business models in Twitter 101′s case studies (venturebeat.com)
• Twitter Tries to Bridge the Gap Between Sign Up and Engagement (marketingpilgrim.com)

After spending yesterday morning at Plug and Play, the Web Mission 09 team spent the afternoon meeting with some Silicon Valley investors. Each firm had a five-minute slot in which to pitch their idea. It certainly felt rather dragon’s-den like, with the key difference being the entrepreneurs on Web Mission 09 tend to be running businesses which are already successful and have clients, products and traction in their market.

The highlight of the pitching came from Simon Campbell of ViaPost. He went for a full-on re-enactment of Steve Ballmer’s famous “I love this company” speech and it certainly got some attention.

That evening we had a night off from formal events. I managed to get tickets to see Gavin DeGraw play the Great American Music Hall. It’s a lovely venue and proved to be a great night out. Oh and if you’re a DeGraw fan, you can hear his new album early on Spotify, the web’s best music service.

This morning was one of the most discussed sessions of the week: a full day at Oracle getting an insider’s view on their Enterprise2.0 developments and plans. Highlights included finding out about Beehive, Oracle’s Collaborative Enterprise Platform, an insight into their Social CRM offering and one-to-one meetings with the Global head of M&A.

Beehive is a central plank in Oracle’s social and collaboration strategy. It provides enterprise customers with team collaboration tools (blogs, discussions, tags and wikis) and tools for synchronous collaboration (conferencing, presence, instant chat and voice chat). They are pitching it against a host of Microsoft tools and claimed that a deployment for a 5,000 person firm would save a company 54% on hardware costs and 70% on software if buying Microsoft.

I had to rush back early to San Fran. I’d left it a little late and decided that rather then wait for a cab I should walk to the train station. Crossing over yet another 5-lane dual carriage-way I noticed a sign to San Fran and decided, for the first time in 15 years, to see what would happen if I tried to hitch a lift back to the city. Within ten seconds a car stopped for me.

By co-incidence it was driven by a software developer who built the Imbee, a Social Network for kids with strong parental supervision capabilities. Even more of a co-incidence, Imbee, like our own community platform, is based on Drupal, the open-source modular framework and content management system. So we spent a happy 35 minutes discussing the 100,000 strong Drupal developer community. He even dropped me off at my door. Thank you.

Read all of Charlie’s WebMission 09 blog posts here.