Is Twitter More For Business Or Pleasure And Does It Actually Work?

Twitter September 5, 2010 10 Comments




There are days when I feel like giving up on Twitter. It can feel like a massive time drain and I often wonder why I would care what people are up to in their daily lives or bitching about other people’s lives. I often wonder if it is good for business and wherever possible I try and scale it down during work hours and only use it as a social tool when I have some spare time. Having said that I just had yet another amazingly powerful experience of it today that made me analyze what exactly I have achieved by using Twitter in the last couple of years. As you will see from the small list below (which is by no means everything) there have been some massive wins. The problem is that getting the most out of Twitter is a delicate skill and really involves a two way conversation which most businesses and brands don’t get given that there are so many pressures on targets and revenues on a daily basis. You’ll see here though that there are massive benefits to Twitter and writing this and putting it all in to perspective really has opened my eyes to just what it has helped me achieve…

All Ireland Final Tickets

This is just the latest incredible use of it today. For those not familiar with Irish sport today is All Ireland Hurling day and tickets to this event are like gold dust. I put out a tweet saying the following yesterday not expecting anything in return…

I didn’t even have to leave the comfort of my own home and less than 12 hours later I had my hands on a ticket to one of the biggest events of the year thanks to This Dublin Hotel. In years gone by I would have been out on the streets looking for a ticket for hours.

Raising Investment

Earlier in the year we raised 500k in investment to help manage the growth of our company and expand in to the UK. I won’t say this wouldn’t have happened without using Twitter but had it not been for the tiny spark of Twitter at the start of the process our entire company might have taken a different direction. As always it wasn’t a direct link but by following somebody who invited me to a conference where we were then introduced to somebody who saw our vision and decided to take us under their wing and link us up with high level investors in the UK.

Over 250k In Business

This is the tricky one. Many brands and businesses come on to Twitter looking to make direct sales but it just doesn’t work like that. Even the figure above took me a very long time to figure out. I actually think it is a lot higher but the problem with Twitter is that you can never measure these things directly. There have been intros made via Twitter which is pretty much like a referral in the real world. There have been people who have approached us after seeing our blog or conferences that we have put on or just people within my own personal network who have passed us on to other people within their network. The important thing to remember here is that some of the biggest pieces of business that we have brought in have been thanks to people with under 100 followers which goes to show that anybody has influence on Twitter no matter what size they are or how influential they are deemed to be.

Countless Media Opportunities

There is no doubt that Twitter helps raise your profile and offers opportunities that you would never get otherwise. The other key ingredient here is that Twitter is populated by journalists, researchers and media folk who are all looking for the latest breaking story so if you connect with these people and engage with them in a meaningful way not only do you become the “go to” person in your industry but you also will benefit massively from exposure for your won personal products or business.

Our Entire Business

Myself and Lauren met in London 18 months ago and started chatting about business in general. We had not idea that we would start a business until about a month after that. We had been chatting through Twitter and sharing links to things in social media that we had a shared interest in. One thing led to another and about a month later we started the ball rolling to start Simply Zesty. Without that simple communication channel that was Twitter the idea would never have blossomed and would just have been another chat in a bar. As it is our logo came via Twitter, the site design and photos also came through people we know on Twitter as well as many of the staff who now work with us and the suppliers we use on a daily basis.

100k Monthly Visitors To This Blog

I often speak of the negligble traffic effect that Twitter has on this blog these days (it brings in about 1.5% of the overall traffic) and the only thing we really do is tweet is from the @simplyzesty and some of the better stories from my own and Lauren’s accounts. Having said that starting any blog is an incredibly difficult thing to do and most people give up because only a handful of people read your early posts or leave comments. Thanks to Twitter and our own personal networks we were able tot start off with a couple of hundred readers from day 1 and the reason it spread from nothing to something that has some readers is because of Twitter. I see people all the time trying endlessly to get traffic from Twitter but the click through rates are just horrendous but I genuienly don’t think this blog would be where it is today without Twitter in the early days. For the early days of blogging Twitter is like steroids.

Friends And Personal Reccomendations

Some of the people I have met through Twitter have become personal friends and are people who would do anything to help you. I must say most of these come from the early days of using it when there was a much smaller community on Twitter but they remain people who I can share ideas and information with today. Some are business people, journalists, bloggers or just regular folk who are there to help each other. This is where the real power lies and none of the amazing results above would have been possible had it not been for that personal touch on Twitter. I’ve been to huge sports events (Thanks @johnpeavoy) and attended conferences and entertainment events that I would not normally have considered had it not been using Twitter. The important thing to remember is that Twitter has a huge offline social layer as well where it ties in with the real world at both events and networking for business.

Insane To Stop

Imagine after achieving all of the above that I would consider stopping to use the service. There are negative sides to it though in that it can be a massive time drain and you can get caught up in meaningless banter all day long if that is what you are after but the real life business examples are there and it works. The big issue is explaining this to companies and businesses who are under pressure to get instant results and increase sales. The results I have managed to achieve above have been the result of putting in an insane amount of nearly 14k Tweets over the course of two and a half years! It’s vitally important that you tie it in with good work in the offline work because you can get caught up in a circle of thinking that Twitter itself is work which it clearly isn’t. There is no doubt that Twitter is an incredible tool but it is never going to work for you over night and it takes time and effort to build your network which is where the real value lies.

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