It’s interesting to know the role of social media in today’s businesses and how we can utilize it as a marketing tool. As part of the campaign we’re launching for our Interactive Development Services, my colleague Mark and I would like to share our thoughts on the effects of Social Media particularly Twitter in a business.

As we can observe, the current trend of marketing is now anchored on the social media landscape, more specifically, via social networking sites (SNSs). One of the most popular SNSs to date is Twitter, which is designed for microblogging, enabling users to send and receive messages known as tweets. Tweets are short text-based inscriptions that are displayed on the author’s page and sent to the author’s subscribers which are known as followers. Although public messages are more often than not used by subscribers, privacy options are also available through a system of direct messaging (DM). This system of following and tweeting regarding business opportunities between companies is the method used by most corporations worldwide.

According to an article posted by Chris Brogan, 50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business, Tweeting actually helps in easily organizing instant meetups (tweetups) with clients and probable business partners. It enables instant communication between two companies without the hassle of expensive international calls or exhaustive connections research. Twitter is a perfect jumpstart for any infant company, more specially within the IT industry which coincidentally dominates the population of companies with twitter accounts (as expected of them). From an article Real-life Twitter Business Success Stories by Meryl Evans, Reese Spykerman, web designer of Design by Reese shares that Twitter rapidly and exponentially expands her existing network.“I had some clients who were early adopters of Twitter, and their networks started following me. It was a very accessible and quick way for referrals to build without necessarily needing an introduction. Like six degrees of separation, but with fewer degrees,” she says.

On an interview with Alain Yap, Community Manager of Morphlabs, a leading cloud computing platform company said that with an objective of spreading word, better engagement with influencers, reaching out to twitterverse and building that warm personality online for their brand, he created and is now maintaining a twitter account for their company.

“Through Social Media like Twitter, we were able to open doors for potential deals where sales or in the case of operational partnerships, management, eventually takes over and gets contracts signed,” added Alain.

Twitter is also an avenue for services development because it provides space for your critics and with proper analysis on their comments (a.k.a. Retweets), your company could actually learn from them, making your products evolve to fit to their ever-changing needs. As a duly functioning opinion poll, you can also reach to your customers (a.k.a. Followers) by providing questions on your company’s performance or suggestions for further improvement.

By establishing presence in the twitter community or any other SNS, you can actually gain popularity on online ranking surveys starting with an aggressive advertisement of your website which caters the rest of the information regarding your company’s products and services. But, be careful on too much aggression on advertising, you don’t want your followers to either stop following you or consider your tweets as spam.

Twitter population is also something to watch out for. In a blog post of Jeremiah Owyang, Sysmos launched a report on the global usage of Twitter which shows a 50.8% of US based users from the formerly 62.1% unique american users in June last year meaning that twitter users outside US gained a significant increase catering more diversity within the online community. A diverse industry is something you must not disregard if you are expanding your reach and influence in the global market. Biz Stone, co-owner of Twitter reported that the site now has 105 million registered users and quickly growing with 30,000 sign-ups per day. Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day—that’s an average of 600 tweets per second.

A fast growing market with minimum resource requirement within a hassle-free virtualized community is the perfect platform for any aspiring company to increase their profits. So, what can we say? Stop reading (this article is about to end anyway) and start tweeting!

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