Does your company sell a set of products or services that you find customers have more questions about than other products & services that you offer? Sometimes certain products and services require a bit more explanation. At the point of sale, a customer may not know enough to ask specific questions (you don’t know what you don’t know, right?). After the sale occurs, your customer begins using the product or service and BOOM, he runs into a situation whereby he needs to ask someone a question.
If these situations occur on a fairly regular basis at your company, I’m sure you’re either getting a phone call from your customer or he’s going to be stopping back into the store to talk with someone. Wouldn’t it be great if you (or an employee who you delegate) could answer all product and service related questions at one time each day, instead of being interrupted throughout the day from each customer who has a question? For those of you who are shaking your heads YES, then Twitter might be your answer.
I know there are people out there who still don’t believe in Twitter for business, but I certainly know how great it works for Catalyst Marketers and our clients. We love Twitter here at Catalyst Marketers. There are so many opportunities that Twitter creates for small (and large) businesses. We have written about Twitter on this blog before, so if you’re a Catalyst Marketers blog subscriber, then you’ve heard all of this before. If you’re still on the fence about using Twitter for business, then do some research, ask other business owners who you know are using Twitter, and you may even want to check out these posts from us, Dell Does Twitter, Do You?, or Is Gmail Down? I’ll Twitter it. For those of you who have been using Twitter for business, now you may have a new use for the micro-blogging tool, answering customer product & service-related questions.
Now, I know some of you may say, “well, I’ve been using Twitter for Customer Service already”. If so, that’s great. You rock! With that said, you still may find some value in this post, so stay with me.
To successfully roll out this program, begin advertising it within the store, say through printing small signs or including a message on your store bags. The message may simply read, “Tweet us @Your_Company with any questions”. You can then reinforce this message during the point-of-sale. Be sure to educate your employees on this new way of providing customer service. Answer any questions they may have and arm them with answers to possible questions that customers may have (ie. Do I need a Twitter account to tweet with you?). This way, when customers are paying for a product or service that your employees know prompts a lot of customer questions, he/she can explain to your customer that if when she gets home, she has any questions at all, that she can log onto Twitter and tweet @Your_Company her question. Inform your customer that someone will respond to the tweet within 24 – 36 hours.
There are multiple advantages to handling customer questions through Twitter:
- By explaining to customers how they can best get their questions answered, you’ve alleviated any anxiety
- Having customers tweet their questions allows you or your employees to log into your company Twitter account and respond to questions all at once, instead of throughout the day
- In your response, you may want to include a custom hashtag like #CompanyName_CustomerQuestions or something like that. This way people can follow your hashtag and review questions and answers from previous customers. This may save them from having to ask the same question that’s already been answered.
Here at Catalyst Marketers, we love Twitter for business. We think it’s a fantastic online social tool. Hopefully you find the value in Twitter for business as well. Twitter for Customer Service is one of the many ways to leverage the tool. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions about using Twitter for business.
What if FourSquare offered code for online businesses to serve up on their e-commerce website. The code would display a “Check-In on FourSquare” button on every page of the e-commerce site – think ReTweet button for Twitter. Now, whenever a consumer lands on a page within a website that she wants to share with her network, she can simply Check-In at the Website by clicking the FourSquare Check-In button. The code, like the ReTweet code for Twitter, would be open to large e-tailers like Amazon all the way to small blogs and e-commerce sites. 
Once you’ve created a Google Places Profile for your small business, you can then begin using your profile as a way to drive traffic to your blog. First, navigate to your Google Places listing, click “Owner-verified listing” to get to your profile. Once you’re on your Google Places profile, on the right-hand side, there is a text box for you to “post to your place page”. The post to your place page area is the area that you can use to promote a new blog post.
When promoting your blog on Google Places, simply copy/paste the article title into the text box and then copy/paste the article link into the text box. One nice thing about Posting content to your Google Places Page is that Google Places allows you to input 160 characters — 20 more than Twitter. The extra 20 characters allows you to add the article link in full. By not using a URL shortener, you are adding to your inbound links, which is the single biggest factor in ranking you higher in search.
Each and every time you produce a new blog post, a new video, or audio program, there may be some followers who find the content so off-target that they actually stop following your business online. The other day I was on Twitter and clicked on a link that was tweeted by one of my followers. The link brought me to his blog and I read the post. The post was riddled with assumptions, had spelling and grammar mistakes, and was simply uninformative. Just like that, I stopped following this individual on Twitter. If I had been subscribed to his blog, I would have unsubscribed. 
As a business owner, you are probably starting to see the power of FourSquare for business. The more people you get to “check-in” at your local business, the better. Basically those customers who check-in at your local business on FourSquare, just helped you market your business. The cost to you, $0.
In the early days of this blog, we would take time to promote each post on sites like StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, and Mr. Wong. Now, we bypass those social bookmarking sites in order to spend more time promoting our content on sites like Facebook, Twitter, BizSugar and LinkedIn. 
This image was taken directly from the Catalyst Marketers Google Analytics Traffic Sources report. As you can see, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and BizSugar are all in the top 10 traffic sources for Catalyst Marketers. With that said, it’s important to not only focus on quantity of visitors driven from a particular source, but also quality of visit. As you will also see on this report is that StumbleUpon still appears in the top 10 traffic sources for us. What you don’t see is that the quality of those visitors is very low. How do we determine quality of visit?
Retweeting is a process whereby another Twitter user takes what you have tweeted and tweets it out to his/her Twitter followers. You can tell when something has been retweeted when a tweet is prefaced by the capital letters RT. The “RT” is usually followed by the original author’s username. The image to the right shows that @KratzPR retweeted my original tweet.
The key takeaway from this post should be that you need to start using Yelp to promote your small business because not only will Yelp users see your Yelp business listing (and hopefully positive customer reviews/ratings), but so too will local EveryBlock subscribers. Basically, for no money at all, you can attract new prospects to your business from two different online tools, Yelp & EveryBlock.
The idea for this post actually came when I posted the following question on Twitter, “Working on new posts for the Catalyst Marketers blog, does anyone have topics they’d like me to explore?” I received the following response, which is the basis for this post, “@EnviroBooty I have heard from Social Media Magic that your profile itself should be rich in your pertinent keywords. If that’s true, just wondered why”. So thanks to 
Don’t simply stop at adding keywords to your Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, & LinkedIn profiles, use those keywords in your daily online conversations. When you respond to comments on Yelp, try to add a keyword where it makes sense (don’t go overboard). When tweeting, use your small business keywords. If you make a wall comment on your small business Facebook Fan Page, use your keywords. All of these efforts will pay off in moving all of your online business profiles up in the search ranks. 
