The beauty of Twitter is its simplicity. At the EconSM conference in San Francisco a couple months ago, Twitter’s Kevin Thau told the audience that the company was seeing adoption by lots of small businesses without any hand holding or education from big T itself. The significance of this SMB adoption is not lost on Twitter. Whether the company tries to make any money off of this population is another question.
Regardless Twitter is increasingly being adopted by relatively savvy SMBs as a marketing, blogging and CRM tool.
Tim Cohn pointed me to this article on Boston.com about a wide range of local restaurants using Twitter to reach potential and existing customers:
On Dec. 2, computer consultant Jen Deaderick got on the social-networking site Twitter and posted: “Tupelo02139 is preparing.’’ It was her first missive, or tweet, on behalf of the Cambridge restaurant Tupelo, where her husband is a chef. The restaurant was more than four months away from opening.
Other tweets followed, about getting inspected, planning the menu, picking the paint. By the time Tupelo opened at the end of April, word had spread among followers of the restaurant’s Twitter stream (@tupelo02139), and their followers’ followers, and so on.
“Our opening night was packed,’’ Deaderick said. “At least half were there because of Twitter.’’
July 1, 2009 at 12:49 am |
[...] from: More on Twitter and Local Eateries Tagged as: advertising, distribution, each-preferred, econsm, francisco, hand-holding, kevin-thau, [...]
July 1, 2009 at 3:08 pm |
Nice post. I think Food, Wine, Beer & local ‘events’ are going to be a mainstay on Twitter… And the use of Twitter by local restaurants and pubs (bars) is also a big trend across the pond in the UK. Not only is it an easy way – I see it sort of somewhere between email newsletters/lists and blogging – to stay connected (=CRM), but it is a good way to promote events.
On a related theme we did a pilot social media marketing project for an event at a UK pub/restaurant. This was a very local event – not that easy a place to get to, small, niche etc. On the back of this success the venue will do a 2nd beer festival in October and they now have both Twitter and a solid email list going for mini-promotions. (note: the venue is a big wedding spot and that main season is Apr-Sep in the UK, hence a beer festival was a new way to promote the restaurant). We put a case study up on Slideshare – you can find it via this link:
http://afullerview.wordpress.com/2009/06/12/cheers-to-social-media-a-social-media-marketing-case-study/
July 1, 2009 at 9:50 pm |
I think a twitter profile page may end up being the primary website for many SMB’s. Has lots of ramifications for many of the companies offering ad packages/products to SMBs.
July 2, 2009 at 3:05 pm |
[...] media sites like Facebook and Twitter to promote a small UK beer festival. He discussed it in a comment but it’s worth highlighting and includes specific numbers and ROI [...]
July 24, 2009 at 7:58 am |
[...] traditional media to blogs big and small, there are countless stories in circulation about how businesses are using Twitter to find customers and serve existing ones. [...]