Is Twitter useful for your small business needs?

For some, it is. It’s quick. Punchy and you can say so much with so few words. It’s easy. You can show your style. Tell stories. Ask questions, take an informal poll, report what’s going on in your community or update your co-workers. And it’s free.

In case you don’t want to admit that you’ve never Twittered, know that it’s part of a vast array of social media that unique in that it limits posts, (called “Tweets”) to 140 characters. That’s anywhere from three to five sentences. This is great for those of you who aren’t ready to commit to a blog and find it overwhelming to consider updating their website every week.

Every time you Twitter, your “tweets” (posts, you can also call this form of communication micro-blogging) are listed on your profile page and sent to anyone who has signed up to “follow” you. You can create a private circle of family and friends, or you can make it public. To date, Twitter has about two million users–not a shabby audience.

Don’t think for one minute that Twitter doesn’t have business applications. It made a big impact in the elections and in the media. Large businesses run Twitter sites and they use it to offer human interest stories of employees, customer’s problems solved, how-to tips, recipes, and they have a huge following.

A great use of Twitter is when businesses use it to send each other updates on conferences, sales reports, when a meeting is postponed, and no doubt lay off news in today’s economy. CNN got Twittered in 2008–along with CBS, the BBC and just about everybody else. It’s proven useful in reporting natural disasters, such as the recent California wildfires as well as political events happening around the globe.

Some Helpful Tips If You Decide to Twitter:

Use Twitter Search or another search program to see if someone’s talking about you or your business (remember keywords?) Jump in if it’s appropriate. Be friendly, helpful, but don’t go for the hard sell.

Help! Keep that in the front of your brain. Your goal as a business is to be of help. Take a blog post or article you’d normally post on your site and break it into little chunk-sized bites. Spread out these helpful morsels. Give away just enough goodies to make them want to come and find you for more.

Try Tweetdeck or Twhirl–these two programs are great for managing Twitter.

Don’t feel the need to respond to every tweet. You’ll go crazy.

Use TinyURLs so you can use those 140 characters for something other than a web address.

Keep it all about the business. While you can certainly (and should) incorporate style and a sense of humor, you might want a separate personal account for un-business related chatter.

Be a commenter. It’s a compliment when someone takes the time to respond, so get a conversation going.

Go for interaction. Just as on your website or your blog, your purpose is build an audience, and there’s no better way to do that than to ask a question, get some opinions, or start a poll.

Don’t forget to tweet from your cell phone–that’s what makes Twitter unique. While you could use your phone to text your girlfriend or a co-worker, but can tweet the entire office on your phone via SMS.

Check out Twitter and see if it suits your style. Businesses are defining how to use social media, and Twitter might be just the tool that fits for you and your small business needs.

Lately, mobile marketing has been cropping up everywhere. It`s still relatively new, so you`ll find that the competition at this point is still relatively nil. That being said, a lot of small business owners are wondering if mobile marketing really is a good way to go . . . better than, say, email marketing or blog advertising.

While mobile marketing might seem like something out of reach for small businesses, it is actually uniquely suited to them. If you`re a local business, in particular, this could be a great way to go.

Mobile marketing allows you to tightly target your market. You can choose to only advertise to those within your area, for example, so you would end up spending far less money than on a national campaign. It`s certainly worth testing for anyone looking for more publicity in the local area, though you can also expand this to include more generalized areas.

Though mobile marketing may not be ideal for every small business, it is definitely a good way to go for some. If you want to test marketing to a small, very targeted market, then mobile marketing is ideal and could bring you some very impressive results.

There are so many ways to market your small business that it is literally impossible to try them all. However when it comes to testing things, you should definitely think about mobile marketing.

Reason Number One: It`s New
Mobile marketing hasn`t been around that long and it certainly hasn`t been exploited to the extent that email has, which means people are more receptive to it still.

Reason Number Two: Mobile Marketing is Specific
You can target your market very specifically, so you are only reaching people who are interested in your industry. Targeted markets are the key to successful marketing.

Reason Number Three: It`s Cheap
Mobile marketing is still new and reasonably priced, making it the ideal type of marketing to try out. You can spend very little money while testing the method out.

Mobile marketing is still a great thing to get into and if your target market carried a cell phone or Blackberry (which is nearly every target market these days!), then you can try this technique to see if it suits you and your business.

You bet it is. This article tells it better than I can. But I’d like to point out a few things that I found interesting:

But when it comes to making decisions, Gen Y tends to rely on their network of friends and their recommendations, not traditional ads. “Ads that push a slogan, an image, and a feeling, the younger consumer is not going to go for,” says James R. Palczynski, retail analyst for Ladenburg Thalmann & Co. Instead, they respond to “humor, irony, and the unvarnished truth.” They’re also somewhat distrusting of ads, which is why grassroots efforts can also work. However, don’t get too comfortable, Gen Y doesn’t have brand loyalty - they’re quick to move the next big thing.

Take away: Cut the five-second soundbite. No canned elevator speeches. And don’t expect Gen Y to love you enough to live with you for the rest of your life (I’m not talking about marriage here).

Traditional advertisers know that young people are the most easily persuaded demographic in the world because they don’t have brand loyalty and their willing to try new things. That may change with the younger set today. No brand loyalty means never, not not yet. And did you get that part about valuation of peer opinions and attitudes? If you want to reach Generation Y, you’ve got to give them the ability to communicate directly with their friends about you and not be afraid of what they’ll say. Internet marketing is the only medium that allows you to do that comfortably, affordably, and conveniently.

Web Sites Will Need to Cater to Shorter Attention Spans: No more long boring text! Thanks to constant media input, Gen Y has shorter attention spans and their “grasshopper minds” leap quickly from topic to topic. (They also didn’t read this whole article…too long!)

Take away: Short, snappy articles with short, snappy sentences. And lots of multimedia.

Generation Y, who sees the mobile as a social device first and an information device second, is not using today’s mobile search as much as expected. But Generation Y is using mobile phones to access social networks.”

Take away: Make your website social and mobile accessible.

For locally based businesses that don´t necessarily need to advertise to a worldwide audience, mobile marketing can be a great way to reach your target market and is often fairly affordable for a small business. While there is a movement toward video ads, most mobile marketing is still text based, so you only need to hire a copywriter if you aren´t comfortable writing your own ads.

Mobile marketing is very effective because it can be used to reach people who are interested in your products and live in the area. Also, people are not yet as jaded of text messages as they are with emails that advertise products. Your text ads can still be very effective and in many cases, if you word them carefully, will be seen as something useful, rather than an intrusion.

Mobile marketing originally became popular in Europe and Asia, long before North America picked it up. Because of this popularity in other areas first, Mobile marketing has already run through the testing phase and is far more refined now that Americans are getting into it.

Consider using mobile marketing for your small business if you aren´t already. It´s a great way to branch out without spending too much on advertising and can be truly efective, reaching those who are interested in your products and services. Text messaging could be just what your business needs to get it moving forward.

Caroline Melberg
Small Business Mavericks
Small Business Mavericks Blog

Mobile marketing is starting to pick up speed. No one is sure just yet how mobile marketing will play out in the end. Text messaging is the current trend, but as more businesses get in on the mobile action, I see the trends changing. Google is starting to offer pay-per-click advertising for mobile advertisers and some local advertising directories like Superpages have been offering pay-per-call for some time now. Personally, I see the pay-per-action game getting more popular, but there are different forms that it could take with regard to mobile marketing. Let’s take a look at a few.

• Text (SMS) Messaging - Text messaging is simply sending out SMS messages to cell phone users. This form of advertising is the equivalent of e-mail marketing, but currently there is a lot of spam. People are just sending text messages left and right. As mobile marketing grows, the sophistication of text messages will also grow and sooner or later mobile phone users will demand a solution to mobile spam. Best practices will begin to develop and I believe we’ll start seeing text messaging newsletters, or e-zines. But for now, you can send out short but sweet offers to your mobile customers to drive them to your store. It’s a beautiful option.
• Pay Per Click - Pay per click advertising is currently the most popular form of online advertising. Google has a dominant position here and likely will for years to come. Since many mobile phones comes with browsers, pay per click advertising will provide advertisers a way to reach mobile customers easily and inexpensively - at first. As more mobile phones come browser enabled, the demand for pay per click will rise and the cost of the ads will go up. This will likely overtake text messages in popularity when the majority of mobile phone users have browsers.
• Pay Per Call - This model requires mobile phone users to click an add to make a phone call. Google may develop this technology later, after its pay per click for mobile takes off. But for now, I only know of Superpages and a few smaller companies offering this option. It is a powerful option and whether or not it becomes more popular will depend a lot on the demand of mobile users.
• Pay Per Video - This mode of advertising hasn’t been developed yet (that I know of), but it has potential. What needs to happen is mobile demand for the medium of video, which hasn’t happened on a wide scale yet. But it could.
• Pay Per Text - Text messaging currently is not a pay per action model. Since you can send out text messages from phone to phone for nothing more than the cost of the service from your mobile provider (which is very inexpensive), but if text messaging providers start offering the service to non-mobile users then there could be a market for the medium. The cost will likely be by bulk texting so advertisers would pay per thousand messages sent, or something like that.
• Pay Per Impression - Google recently rolled out a pay per impression option on its pay per click advertising platform, Google AdWords. It is possible that they could later offer the same option on mobile pay per click.
• Mobile Banner Advertising - Banner advertising has been around awhile. It is mostly used for branding as most people don’t click on the ads anyway. But mobile phone users could very well be the next market as browsers for mobile phones become more in demand.

When it comes to mobile marketing, the field is wide open. We’ve come a long way, but there is still a long way to go. I see mobile marketing for small businesses growing in popularity. It’s already a fast growing product.

Caroline Melberg
Small Business Mavericks
Small Business Mavericks Blog

First there was television, then came the computer. The “Third Screen” in marketing circles is the mobile phone, and I predict it’s going to be an incredible opportunity for small business owners who want to get their message in front of local customers who are looking to buy right now. Mobile search is immediate, and allows you to put your products and services in front of prospects who are not only looking for what you sell, but who are most likely out driving around trying to find it. This clip from AdAge shows that already “49% of all mobile phone users are using their mobile phones” or more than voice calls. That is onlly going to increase as new devices are released (like Apple’s cool iPhone) that make it easier to surf the web from your mobile phone.

Mobile search is a trend that small business owners can’t afford to NOT pay attention to.

clipped from adage.com One in 16 Some 49% of all mobile phone users are using their mobile phones for text messages, music and other uses besides simple voice calls, but, at the moment, only one in 16 mobile-phone subscribers are using the devices for audio features. Of those, almost two-thirds have transferred either music or other audio content from another device, such as a PC or MP3 player. The study found that most mobile-audio users are in those sought-after, hard-to-reach males aged 25 to 44, with a larger proportion of them African American, Asians and Hispanics. Surprisingly, the study found 31% listened to music on their mobile devices — not at on the go, but at home, where the phone served as a “personal third screen entertainment platform.”