follow us on twitter!

A while back we considered creating a ‘page’ on Facebook for Business Ready.  The idea being that with so many Facebook users it would be a great place for friends and family to promote us by becoming ‘a fan’ and in turn maybe some of their friends and family would become fans, and so on.  But the problem is ‘friends and family’.  Sure, you could argue that some of those friends and family members are potential customers of Business Ready but was this really the best way to create visibility for us?

As we prepare for our full product launch in January ‘09 we’ve been thinking a lot about marketing.  At our last staff meeting we talked about the success on Facebook.  At best, clients of ours have signed between 20-25 ‘fans’ of their corporate pages, they are not updating the content, most of the ‘fans’ are friends, no comments are left and the viral uptick has not occurred.  Facebook still remains the go to social network for sharing pics and updates with family and friends but it really is not right for business.  To be honest, we use LinkedIn for our business relationships and keep it personal on Facebook.  As such, I’ve recently started using the ’status update’ within LinkedIn to let my professional relationships know what I’m up to.  Unfortunately, this is linked to me as an individual, doesn’t provide for feedback back to me and I want to promote what holds Business Ready’s attention today.

Follow Business Ready on Twitter!

LUV IT!  Finally another place for Business Ready to tell the world about product releases, new blog entries, what conferences we are attending and other things we are thinking about, or doing, while giving our audience another great way to engage with us.  I truly believe Twitter is a key social media tool for business to get us closer to ‘the little guy’.

Just a few tips we are going to follow:

• use Twitter Search to see who is doing what to whom
• we’ll try to not always be just promoting our stuff
• we won’t just dump a link to the blog but try to give you a bit more as to why you should click through
• we’ll ask questions! and answer your @replies
• we’ll tweet about other people’s stuff too
• I really like this TinyURL tool

I did follow up with one client about Twitter vs. Facebook and they had 28 fans on Facebook (with one comment) and 144 followers on Twitter.  The dialogue on Twitter was way more relevant (and robust) and you can see their audience is appreciative of having this medium available to them.  Yeah!

A nice little solution for the little guy.