The Twitter debate goes on

Saturday, 10 October 2009 09:57

Latest darling of the social network landscape - Twitter - featured on the local breakfast show recently. An 'expert' (don't know if he is or isn't one) suggested that Twitter wasn't for everyone.

Many small business owners must have breathed a sigh of relief.

Unless it's appropriate for your target audience, Mr Expert went on to say (quite sensibly).

But this advice may not be that useful in our view, as some SME's won't know the answer to this question.

Part of the challenge of utilising the web for business is keeping ahead of (or at least up with) tools and mechanisms that your customers are using to do business, communicate with you and each other. A business needs to look at each trend in the context of their own business and make a decision to leverage it or not.

Our advice to many businesses is to get someone who understands your business to provide an informed, fully explained recomendation as to if, how and when to utilise new communication mechanisms.

Some SME's can do this by using a designated in-house employee who's job it is is to keep up. But that person will have to be given permission to use it (in this case, Twitter), research it and test it's effectiveness to begin to understand it's potential purpose.

Alternatively, involve experts to help you do it. Some SME's simply don't have the resources or the motivation to establish and maintain levels of expertise in all areas of their business. Leveraging the web (as a key sales channel) is one of them.

Consider establishing a relationship with an experienced, knowledgeable web expert who can help keep your business on track with your goals for the web. In some cases this might involve establishing what those goals are first. This would provide context for decisions such as how to ride trends like the social media wave.