Does it work for what?
I was asked a question on Twitter last night, OK it wasn’t me who was asked the question directly but it was a tweet that caught my eye and prompted me to respond, the question was “Do you think that twitter works?”. My simple response was yes, it does work, well it works for me, but it did get me to thinking why does it work and what does it work for?
Firstly, we have to remember that Twitter is part of the Social Media world, and as such there are many users who use purely as a social interaction with other people in the world who have similar interests, or not. Of course there are also many people who do not see Twitter as a medium for interacting, they quite like just to be able to tell the world what is going on, or tweet endless motivational quotes, or indeed to tell the world what they had for breakfast, lunch & dinner, and which pub they went to for a beer that evening!
This is all very well, and there are people who have built up huge followings by doing just that. It obviously works for them, and that’s good – nothing wrong with that!
Secondly though, if you are in the Social Media world for business, then how do you make it work for you?
For me, though, you have to do a bit of both (be social and be business orientated), people are not always interested in your work, but they might be interested in your hobby, so to create interaction you have to talk both! After all, didn’t someone once say that people buy from people! If they like you as a person then they are likely to buy off you when they need to buy your product.
I’d like to give a couple of examples of how I see Twitter working – and for this I will use my @llamakevin persona – firstly, and this is a story of just over a year ago, I complained on Twitter about the poor service that I was getting from the BT engineers who were taking an age to fix my telephone line, I got quite a few comments from fellow tweeters sympathising with the problem as we have all been through that, when I got a tweet from @BTCare – asking if they could help. Long story short – they helped, problem dealt with quicker than I could have sorted it, and they gave me a free months line rental. This is Twitter working for BT – instead of me whinging about them, I now praised them for sorting my problem out!
I am also a QuickBooks trainer, I drop the odd tweet in mentioning this fact, and have received three referrals out of the blue from people who have taken notice of this, and have spotted someone in their circle of friends/tweeters who have needed some help on this – that’s Twitter working for me!
Finally, I have a holiday cottage that I rent out – if I leave it to the agent to get all of my bookings, I would have only 6 bookings so far in 2011, but here we are in July and I have had one empty week so far, plus I am booked until October with the exception of two weeks in July, a lot of this has been through Twitter (at least 6 direct bookings) and quite a few indirect (recommendations from twitter folk who stayed last year). It hasn’t just been Twitter, a little bit of help from eBay and facebook have also helped, but Twitter has done better than my agents! This is Twitter working for me!
Does Twitter work for you?
