Marketing Small Businesses With Twitter – NYTimes.com
This article was published in July but it’s still very much relevant. Here’s a snippet:
Small businesses typically get more than half of their customers through word of mouth, he said, and Twitter is the digital manifestation of that. Twitter users broadcast messages of up to 140 characters in length, and the culture of the service encourages people to spread news to friends in their own network.
For many mom-and-pop shops with no ad budget, Twitter has become their sole means of marketing. It is far easier to set up and update a Twitter account than to maintain a Web page. And because small-business owners tend to work at the cash register, not in a cubicle in the marketing department, Twitter’s intimacy suits them well.
Twitter and Facebook are free! Print out your profile addy in multiple on sheets of 8×11 paper, cut it out and hand it out to clients. Give it out with change. People will start adding you. Update once a day, once a week… whatever works for you. Don’t think too hard! Consider it a conversation. What would you tell people on the street? Go! Have fun! Make money!
