In her article, “Tweeting for profit”, Alsever (n.p.) presents the experiences of various small entrepreneurs with Twitter as a cool tool for marketing their products. Alsever starts by giving the example of Drey who is the CEO of a website development company called Fliqz. He has turned to Twitter to try and market his company. By embracing twitter as a marketing tool, the only overhead cost that Drey hopes to incur is the time that he spends tweeting. Although twitter has not brought in a lot of business deals for Drey, he nonetheless makes about 30 deals every month while only investing 8 hours of his time. This translates to only about 2% of his company’s annual marketing budget of $ 15, 000.
Another success story that Alsever gives is that of 52Teas, a company that sells handcrafted teas. The company realized a two-fold increase in its weekly sales after advertising its products on twitter for only a week. The article also explores how Mission Pie, a bakery based in San Francisco has been outselling its organic pie by advertising on twitter. Alsever (n.p.) is however quick to note that these are the exceptions, rather than the norm. Many other companies have not been so lucky with a tweeter. She cites the example of Starbucks whose brand has been misused by other tweeter users posing as Starbucks. Since twitter is an untested arena, it is hard to handle such anomalies. In addition, there are not enough sophisticated techniques to filter the high number of tweeter chatters. It is also time-consuming to tweet. Twitter has proven to be a very powerful tool for creating product and service awareness online.
For small business owners, the tweeter is the ideal platform for expanding the customer base. Since most small businesses operate under tight promotional budgets, twitter can be an effective marketing tool (Shaw 11) as it is free, accessible, and simple to use. Businesses can also provide links to their websites on twitter so that interested customers can view them and hopefully make a purchase.
Works Cited
Alsever, Jeniffer 2009. Tweeting for profit. 2009. Web.
Chang, Alexandra. Should you care about Pinterest? 2012. Web.
Miles, Jason and Karen, Lacey. Pinterest Power: Market Your Business, Sell Your Product, and Build Your Brand on the World’s Hottest Social Network’ 1 edition. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2012. Print.
Shaw, Mark. Twitter Your Business: A beginner’s guide to using Twitter to successfully promote you and your business. Newton, Massachusetts: Harriman House, 2011. Print.