If you are like me, you have heard about Twitter but really haven't understood the practical application of what it can do for the sales process for your clients...until now. Ad Age posted "Twitter Proves It's Worth As A Killer App For Local Businesses" with tips on how to make it work for your business like it did for "Naked Pizza"...
"Naked Pizza, a New Orleans healthful-pizza shop that's hoping to go national -- Mark Cuban is a backer -- has been marketing itself via the microblogging service. And recently it has started to track Twitter-spurred sales at the register. In a test run April 23, an exclusive-to-Twitter promotion brought in 15% of the day's business.
"Every phone call was tracked, every order was measured by where it came from, and it told us very quickly that Twitter is useful," said Jeff Leach, the restaurant's co-founder. "Sure, there's the brand marketing and getting-to-know-you stuff. ... But we wanted to know: Can it make the cash register ring?"
So how could it work for your Broadcast or Interactive property? Why not pay a staffer to "Tweet" various bits of information and recruit followers to your feed and intersperse advertising "tweets" inside of that content that the audience will find relevant and worthwhile. They even posted 5 tips for using the service for business owners...
"TRACK EVERY SALE. Sure, Twitter's relatively cheap, but you still want to know you're getting something for the human effort. Naked Pizza's point-of-sale system codes the origin of every order -- was it from a specific coupon or a box topper? -- which allowed it to calculate that a recent "Tweetie Pie" Twitter promotion, accounted for 15% of his shop's revenue on the day it ran.
TWITTER IS NOT FACEBOOK. Twitter is more immediate -- if a person doesn't check their Twitter feed for an hour she could easily miss the message. Berry Chill CEO Michael Farah uses Twitter for real-time communication ("Spotted: Justin Timberlake at Berry Chill!") and Facebook for longer-lead calls to action, like enlisting focus-group volunteers.
CREATE A CONVERSATION. Don't blast promotions incessantly. Intersperse them with other nuggets of wisdom or news related to your products and industry or neighborhood. Or, if you have a broader social mission, use Twitter to communicate that. Naked Pizza co-founder Jeff Leach suggests that if these kinds of social technologies become game changers, there may be a day when companies' initial business plans take into consideration whether they have anything worth microblogging.
SELL LAST-MINUTE INVENTORY. Twitter's immediacy is its biggest strength -- so use it to pump up business during lulls or discount last-minute unsold goods, said Zack Steven, co-founder of LocalTweeps, a local Twitter directory, who caught same-day discounted tickets at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis via Twitter.
ALERT FOLLOWERS WHEN YOU'RE ON THE GO. Venture capitalist Fred Wilson likes to point to KogiBBQ, a Korean taco truck that drives around Los Angeles, alerting its almost 20,000 followers to its current and future locations via a Twitter feed."
Reading the comments section, there was a post to a 'Twitter Guide" that I found very informative, you can check it out at: http://twitter.trafficvault.com/