blog

1. Listen to what people are saying

Twitter is a great tool to find out what people are saying about your company, products, or services.  Some free tools made available to you are:

• Mentions - this is a quick and easy way to find what people are saying about you.  It's located right in the navigation on your twitter account page (it will look like @youraccountname).  This will report any mentions of your name in people's tweets.  For example: "I'm flying @Jetblue to Boston".
• Search - This allows you to cast an even wider net in searching all of twitter for anything.  You can use this to see what people are saying about a specific product or service.  What's really cool is you can subscribe to an RSS feed of this query and use any RSS reader to capture mentions of your name, product, service, or anything else.  This way you don't have to keep on checking back - it's all automagic!

2. Communicate with your customers

Twitter allows you to send "direct" messages to other twitter users.  Companies are using this to allow customers to contact them and talk to them directly.  What's really cool is that you can actually setup different twitter accounts for specific issues - your own virtual call center.  You can see a great example of this is Dell's Twitter page:

Dell's various Twitter accounts

3. Broadcast your message

Don't want to spend the time and money on a full blown press release?  Just send out a tweet.  It's only 140 characters and anyone following you will get it.  You can also easily display your tweets on your website or blog.  Twitter provides the code, you just need to copy and paste.  You can get it here for free: http://twitter.com/widgets

4. Network

Twitter is a free networking tool.  Use it!  Instead of spending thousands of dollars to have your sales people attend a convention, have them signup for a twitter account and start talking directly to potential customers or clients.  It's also a great tool to broaden your brand awareness.

5. Join the crowd

Haven't you heard?  EVERYONE is on twitter, including companies like: Jetblue, Bank of America, Comcast, Kodak, Dell and GM - you should be too!  It's free, easy, and actually, quite fun.  You can start here:  http://www.twitter.com