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Apr 2012

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Technology

SME use Twitter to cut Costs

Dolly Bhasin
Jul 2009

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More than 700,000 small and medium businesses are using the Twitter social network to save on marketing and recruitment costs, an O2 survey says.

After asking more than 500 companies with fewer than 20 staff, O2 estimates 17% of the UK's 4.6 million SMEs are using the free social networking site to send three million "tweets" or messages a day. Over one quarter (28%) signed up in the last four weeks.

O2 estimated Twitter users were saving up to £5,000 on marketing and recruitment costs. Cost saving was mentioned by 62% of respondents as the main benefit, the firm said. More than one in ten (16%) said they had saved up to £5,000 since signing up to the service. Nearly a third have saved up to £1,000.

- ComputerWeekly.com

After several preceding months of strong double-digit growth, traffic to Twitter.com accelerated in March, growing 131 percent to 9.3 million visitors worldwide. Fueled in part by celebrity “tweeters” and substantial mainstream media attention, the site ranked as the top-gaining property on web.

The Twitter phenomenon is catching up with Indians too. With over 6,50,000 twitters in India (Source: Mr. Mahesh Murthy -CEO Pinstorm's presentation at 140Conf.com). SMEs are slowly adapting and using new technologies like Twitter to adapt and survive as a tactic for the meeting the current challenges of business.

Five major areas of use have been universally recorded by SMEs

1. As a free communication tool (100%)

2. As a marketing tool for promoting business including recruitment(75%)

3. Stay in touch with customers and suppliers (42%)

4. Monitor their competitors (32%)

5. Ability to keep in touch with other small businesses (28%)(Source O2 Survey)

I would like to explore some of the emerging trends of Twitter use for Small and Medium Businesses that can have a major impact in improving business performance. But before that, I would explain in brief what Twitter is and what the twitter services are.

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read each others' updates, known as tweets.

Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters, displayed on the author's profile page and delivered to other users - known as followers - who have subscribed to them.

Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications.

The service is free over the Internet, but using SMS may incur phone service provider fees.

Twitter Services and Applications

There are various services and applications designed to work with or enhance the basic Twitter. They are designed with various goals - many aim to improve Twitter's functionality whilst others set out to make the service more accessible, particularly from other devices. Some applications allow users to send messages (called tweets) directly whilst others give users the ability to create more complex tweets which they then have to manually post through Twitter itself.

Select List of Twitter Services and Applications

12 Ways SMEs can use Twitter

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