Twitter for Business? Absolutely. - August 16, 2009 at 7:13 am

Twitter remains a popular topic in the mainstream media these days, gaining more and more popularity with public support from celebrities like Oprah and Ashton Kutcher. Most recently it garnered worldwide attention for its role in documenting the uprising in that followed Iran’s controversial election.

Some people have even suggested that Twitter can be a useful business tool, but many remain skeptical of its practicality. My experiences tell me that if used properly, it can indeed be a useful tool for business people, and I’ll give you an example of a B2B webinar I recently ran along with some metrics to give you an idea of just how powerful it can be.

Straight to Performance Numbers

I decided to promote this webinar in two ways: traditional email marketing and Twitter. My email marketing plan was fairly straightforward with two targeted email blasts headed to 7,363 contacts in our company’s database, scheduled within three weeks of the event. After two email blasts with a 1.06% clickthrough rate, I had 66 registrants.

Twitter’s turn. I posted a registration link to our corporate Twitter page, which has about 400 followers including our customers and partners, as well as people who are generally interested in Cloud Computing. The link was almost immediately re-tweeted and subsequently read by thousands of Twitter users due to the viral effect. Numbers? 107 additional registrants, nearly double what I got from two separate email blasts.

In doing some analysis on the people that registered via Twitter, I found that they did not previously exist in our Salesforce database, meaning these people were likely hearing about us for the first time. When we actually held the webinar, Twitter registrants accounted for 60% of the attendees. They also had higher GoToWebinar Interest Ratings of 52 vs. the other attendees’ average rating of 46.8. The rating is a statistic built using a proprietary algorithm calculated based on attendance length, attentiveness, and a few other factors.

The case for Twitter use in a B2B marketing environment is clearly enforced by positive numbers, provided that you set appropriate metrics to begin with. Since this is such a new medium, some of the traditional direct marketing principles no longer apply.

How Else Can it Be Used for Business?

How about customer support? After posting the recording of our webinar to Twitter, we had someone reply that our recording wasn’t Mac-friendly. I apologized, mentioning that GoToWebinar’s only output is in Windows Media Format, unplayable on Mac machines. Within just a few minutes, GoToWebinar replied on Twitter to both of us, providing a workaround that made the recording available to anyone, regardless of their operating system.

The idea that Twitter can be used to provide customer service is catching on quickly with many companies. These include salesforce.com, Comcast, Zappos, Sun Microsystems, and many others. All of these companies are using Twitter in much the same way as GoToWebinar – responding to customer issues quickly and without pretense. Salesforce.com even offers a solution that pulls customer tweets right into its CRM application to notify customer service representatives of the need for follow up, further promoting goodwill in the community.

In addition to interacting with customers and prospects, Twitter offers up a wealth of free information from subject matter experts. All you have to do is find them and follow them, and odds are you will learn a great deal about best practices for any number of business disciplines. There are marketers, accountants, salespeople, operations gurus, you name it – and they’re out there.

I find myself following people and companies in all sorts of industries, just because it’s interesting to hear perspectives different than your own, 140 characters at a time. It’s quick and easy to digest, and is absolutely worthwhile as a business tool.

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Tags: business case, demand generation, marketing, twitter