Going Green

10 Ways Twitter Will Permanently Change Business

By Gail Nickel-Kailing on July 22nd, 2009

Twitter has made the cover of Time magazine! Here at WhatTheyThink we’ve been talking about social media marketing as a great new communication channel for print and marketing service providers. We didn’t stop there either; we’ve been blogging, tweeting, and posting on Facebook and LinkedIn with the best of them!

Businesses are slowly adopting social media marketing. Each month Discover Financial Services publishes a monthly report called Small Business Watch, and April’s “Poll of the Month” focused on social media. Some interesting responses by the small businesses polled:

• 38% are members of online social networking communities, as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or My Space.
• 45% of those who currently belong an online social network use it to promote their businesses.
• 62% percent of small business owners still do not have Web sites for their businesses.

(It’s that last one that is the real surprise!)

24/7 Wall St – an investment analyst site – has come up with ten ways that it says Twitter will permanently change American business within the next two or three years:

• Hyper-local marketing. Since Twitter is still mostly a person-to-person service and not a business-to-business service, it is likely that the Twitter relationship will be with the owners of small shops.
• Using Twitter opens up the opportunity to make a very large and nearly unmeasurable medium like outdoor advertising measurable. For the right incentive it only takes a few seconds for a Twitter user to indicate that he has seen an outdoor ad by texting.
• Twitter will become a huge platform for discussing stocks and other financial instruments and will probably replace message boards like the ones at Yahoo! Finance as the preferred method for discussing individual public companies.
• Twitter will expand the power of the blogosphere by further severing the relationship between mainstream audiences and traditional media.
• Data mining. Twitter is a nearly ideal platform for tapping opinion about customer views of products.
• Large media companies are already using Twitter as a way to alert people to breaking news and new features.
• The use of Twitter for “micropayments,” small loans or payments to companies for services, which is essentially no more than an extension of a user’s PayPal, checking, or credit card accounts is already is in its early stages.
• Twitter may not replace the landline, the cell phone or voice and texting communications but it will certainly supplement them as a way to get around telecom data plans.
• The commercial sector will not be the only part of the enterprise landscape that will be affected by Twitter.
• Philanthropy “as business” use of Twitter will involve social activism and fund-raising.

Recent WhatTheyThink articles about social media marketing:

• Printers Get Sociable – Using Social Media Marketing
• Social Media IS for Printers!
• Print Service Providers…You can Be Social (Media) Too!

Tweet us and let us know what you think…