With all the much hyped Twitter media in town now, no one can ever miss it. Unlike Facebook, which is largely driven by the upsurge, Twitter is being driven directly from the top. Be it Ashton, Oprah, Britney or Hugh Jackman, celebrity endorsement is pushing Twitter hype beyond your thoughts. With all the high class attention to this media, it is unavoidable for marketers to target this segment!  And of late it has become a much profitable resource.



Let’s see some overview of the marketing applications of Twitter. Depending on each one’s perspective of business, the way in which Twitter is being used as a marketing tool differs. Here is a list of ways in which Twitter is being used as marketing channel.

1. Customer Support

Customer support is considered as the best use of Twitter as marketing tool. Customers talk positively and negatively about brands on Twitter. If negative comments or complaints are turned into positive outcomes, they will in turn be shared by the happy customers with many followers and help the brands obtain positive word of mouth. Comcast, Intuit & Telstra are some of the brands that benefited from using Twitter for their customer support.

2. Customer Research

Though reaching the customers directly through Twitter may seem to be a difficult task for many companies but it doesn’t mean that they can’t derive the real benefit of Twitter as a marketing tool. Definitely they can use the Twitters search to find out what their customers are saying about their brands and get instant feedback for free.

3. Informing

Twitter can be a major resource for providing real time information and instant updates. This was well illustrated in the disaster of Mumbai where different people interconnect and receive useful updates quickly. Twitter is commonly used in the sports arena too, where teams like Chicago bulls give their team scores live and updates online in real time. Even companies like TDS used Twitter as an informing tool to update its customers about service outages. However, it is important to note that using Twitter to inform works best only if the information is valuable.

4. Promoting

Twitter has become a popular base for promotions, much like email marketing many companies have used to send offers to its subscribers and have gained a lot of exposure and sales from it. Dell claims it has obtained $1million revenue from Twitter promotions alone. If customers like or love your products or services, they will definitely follow you on Twitter.

5. Building Community Discussion

Community discussions are major contribution for marketing and spreading news word of the mouth via Twitter are helping lots of organizations to improve their business. Marketers have been using hash tags to aggregate community discussions and hash tags have become more popular than ever on Twitter as more brands utilize them.

6. Branding

Many organizations are using twitter to reiterate their brands to existing customers or to a new generation of users. Certain Twitter accounts like Popeye’s Chicken and Dunkin’ Donuts may not seem to have a clear objective but a deeper research will give you an insight on how these companies are using Twitter to target their most lucrative audience – the Gen Y.

The uses of Twitter don’t end here and if you have other suggestions, remember to blog about them and share with everyone.

This original article is presented to you by LetsTalkSeo.com © 2009

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