Market Share: A Blog to Stimulate Business

A client recently engaged me to set up a Twitter account for his law firm. Not that he personally had any intention of spending his precious time tweeting, he merely wanted to appear to be on the cutting edge of today’s trends. Since some of his work involves DWI, he is in frequent contact with a younger generation, many of whom are users and aficionados of social media.

Setting up a Twitter account is actually quite an involved process. First, you need to choose a username by which you will be known to all who use Twitter. It must be a unique name, never used by anyone else in the world of Twitter. This name is limited in length to a finite number of characters which makes this process quite the challenge.

Once accomplished, you need to add a “bio” or description of yourself, or your business, which captures the essence of your raison d’etre on Twitter. Since this blurb (as we call it in the industry) will be the most frequently read piece of info you present – your definition, in essence – it should be carefully crafted to represent both what you wish to communicate as well as how you wish to be perceived. (A true marketing assignment!)

» Next, although you may be anxious to begin tweeting immediately, your Twitter persona will first need both a photo and a page background. Although Twitter graciously provides you with a choice of generic photo icons and backgrounds to select from, saving you the tedium of coming up with your own creative solutions to these further representations of your uniqueness, those who value individuality will cherish this opportunity. First, your photo need not be a photo at all. It can be any type of graphic, text, logo or iconic statement to render you the one-of-a-kind person or business that you are. Second, your background can be something you get from the endless array of Twitter backgrounds one can find searching Google or something you dream up and create yourself, depending on your level of expertise.

However, nothing is quite as simple as it sounds, not that we meant to imply that either task was simple. In fact, both tasks present difficulties above and beyond creativity. First, the photo appears in thumbnail size which means that any nuances, subtleties, tiny details or general clutter will probably not be terribly effective. In fact, the busier the photo, the more apt it will be to blend into obscurity. The background, which wraps around a fixed area where tweets and other Twitter-related info appears, can become easily compromised in effectiveness based on a user’s browser window width. Getting too technical for you? Perhaps the generic Twitter background is more your cup of tea.

Moving right along, perhaps it is time to get down to the actual business of tweeting, a challenge to all who may find themselves unable to express the crux of the matter within 140 characters, which isn’t much room. But if millions of people spend half their life on Twitter, it must be something that comes with practice. So, what to say?

If you are appearing on Twitter under the auspices of your business, it is best to keep your tweets pertinent to business, without any problematic comments or content which could come back to haunt you in some Google search, embarrassing you ten years from now. Can anyone remember what the world was like before Google, where everyone and everything that has any content on the Internet will now live on into perpetuity, regardless of how ridiculous, insignificant, inappropriate or undesirable it may be.

But I digress! Back to the reason for this article…to identify the Value of Social Media in Business… within a medium where millions of people argue the latest gossip ad infinitum, perhaps even ad nauseum. The value of tweeting about your business is that Google picks up such content (particularly if it includes a link to your business website or your business blog) and adds it to the behemoth database of searchable content on the Internet. This means that if you are in the business of creating green widgets, and your tweets mention that fact, should someone out in cyberspace search for green widgets, your website may just pop up atop the search results if you are among only a few green widget creators worldwide. Unless you know how difficult it is to come up on page one of Google search results, you cannot appreciate what a phenomenal accomplishment this is! Why? Because it is rare for anyone to look beyond page one in search results because of impatience or time constraints in this Internet age we live in.

Of course, certainly one tweet may not prove this true. Maybe even 100 tweets may fail to produce such results. But, from personal experience, I have seen participation on Twitter produce website visits, ecommerce sales, and best of all, advancement to the top of search results for many of my clients. How do I know this? Well, that will be the subject for another blog entry.

Tags: the value of social media in business, tweets for business, Twitter for business

This entry was posted on Monday, December 21st, 2009 at 10:30 am and is filed under Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.