What's Online

I get asked often why someone might Twitter. For most people my advice is, "No good reason." That's because they are private individuals who work 9-5 jobs and then go home to their families. Everyone who cares what they are doing (or what they have to say in a couple sentences) will get to ask them over dinner that evening.

But if your business would like to develop a dialogue with a public that follows a conversation with you, Twitter is a free and easy method to open up that dialogue.

Basically, the idea behind Twitter is that someone is curious about someone else, and on the other side, someone wants to nurture that fascination. A fan wants to know what the object of her adoration is up to in his casual moments and feel a personal connection. A famous person wants to satisfy millions of fans in just minutes a week and grow his fan base.

A business wants to control the dialogue about its products or services. It wants to make sure it is not only a part of the conversation thread, but the one leading it. It wants to present a friendly and personal face to the public with only the cost of the staff time for whoever writes it.

Twitter is a great PR tool for any business that caters to the public at large. It's a litle less useful for businesses that cater to other businesses, because realistically, what company would look to Twitter to find out what's up with a company they are thinking of purchasing services from? It's not exactly an official reference source. But I recently started a Twitter account for my consulting business anyway.

It's worth the time to me to get the name of my business in circulation and it doesn't take that much effort. I may only post on there when I update this blog, as many people do, summarizing the gist of a new post so that interested Twitter folks can find the blog when they use the Twitter Search feature to scan for certain topics. Or I may find myself getting more involved in the general dialogue, posting replies to others' Tweets, searching for topics and people I know, etc. We'll see.

For me it's a marginally beneficial PR service, but if your business does fall into that perfect category for which Twitter makes great PR sense, well you can't beat free PR. And on top of all that, just being on Twitter at all paints your brand with "new cool chic," which can be priceless and elusive with some audiences.

Getting started with Twitter is super easy. It literally takes about a minute. Getting a sense that something is actually happening however, can take considerably longer. But hang in there, and consider following AspiraTech -- I'm happy to follow you back as well.

Labels: marketing, PR, social_media