NewsBusiness

As people continue to debate the usefulness of Twitter from a business perspective, and as Twitter continues to think about what it can do to help businesses and in the process make money from the application, we can only speak from our own experience here at NewsBusiness.

Here are a few things we have been using Twitter for:

Looking for business

Over the past month or so, every week we have been typing into the search box “PR Brisbane” to see what comes up. Most of what appears is not relevant (unless we wanted a job in PR), but we have come across two Twitter users who tweeted that they needed a PR firm. So we replied. So far neither has actually turned into a client, but its early days yet!

In fact the other evening at a PR/marketing network event I was speaking with someone in web design who said that their firm had had around 4 new contracts through Twitter. Interestingly, the contacts had come through individuals who worked at the firm on their personal Twitter accounts, not from a corporate Twitter account.

When we get our first client over the line from Twitter, we’ll certainly let you know.

Brand monitoring

Want to know if anyone is talking about your business on Twitter? As above, just type your business name into the search box and see what comes up. I did this recently for a large multinational brand and came across some comments made by someone in Brisbane directly of interest to a colleague who works with that company. If you know what’s being said, particularly if it’s not complimentary, you can do something about it (see our previous post).

Meeting gurus

The other day I was sitting at my desk working when the Tweetdeck application I have in the background chirped and I checked my “Tweets”. A digital media guru I follow (@cameronreilly) was in a cafe about 100m away and had just complained about the coffee. I nipped down to say hi and he ended up buying me a beer (it was a Friday) and we had a very interesting conversation. If the cafe had been on Twitter (or perhaps their PR/marketing people) they might have been able to respond to a complaint that (in theory) could have been read by all of Cameron’s 9,653 followers.

By the way…

You don’t actually have to be registered with Twitter to search messages – you can do this straight from the Twitter home page. So, unless you want to be able to respond to people from within Twitter, you can do most of the things above without signing up or being an active participant in the system.