Twitter BirdTwitter 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.
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