Feb 24 2009

More Useful Than I Thought

More Useful Than I Thought

I’ve had a Twitter account for a couple years but only started using it in earnest in the last couple of weeks.  And while it is to some extent yet another distraction and flow of information, it’s proving to be much more useful than I thought.  Here are some nuggets from literally less than a week of heavy usage:

– Nice quick exchanges with three existing customers who I otherwise wouldn’t talk to

– Already have over 200 followers, at least 50% just in the last few days

– One set of direct messages, and we turned a skeptic into a free trial provided that the client work with us on an important but difficult case study we’ve been meaning to generate for a while

– One quick @reply later, and I turned someone asking about our services into a live sales call with a local sales team member in London and a positive public tweet back about us

– An exchange with a customer who left us for the competition (partially – he’s still on Sender Score Certified) and said something snarky about us on Twitter yielded a positive tweet and this comment: 

Thanks going out of your way to better understand your customers. That in and of itself means a lot.

– Serendipity – I was on the west coast, noted it, and a friend there pinged me to see if I had time to get together (I didn’t this trip, but that would have been a nice bonus)

– Set up my blog to notify of any new post via Twitter using twitterfeed.com…set up Facebook to pick up my tweets as status updates using the Facebook Twitter app.  The result is that my traffic is WAY up on the blog

I’m sold.  Now I just need to figure out how to be interesting and brief at the same time.