Tweeting Your Business towards Better Customer Relationships

Businesses large and small are taking advantage of social media communities like Twitter to provide increased customer satisfaction and experience.

Business can spend hundreds or thousands of dollars trying to provide their clients with quality experiences. Customer relationship management is an entire industry to itself. The good news is that you don’t need an advanced degree in human psychology or a huge budget in order to provide your paying customers with that little extra edge they need to return and buy from you again and again. The Internet has brought amazing new tools to the business world. Social media marketing in general and company’s like Twitter specifically can improve and enhance how you interact with new and existing clients.

Like many other popular and successful social communities, Twitter has evolved its offerings and through growth and portrayal in the mainstream media, has graduated from being just another computer geek service. If you’re not familiar with what Twitter is suffice it to say that you’re already behind the 8 ball. But all is not lost.

Twitter provides a communications medium to both individuals and businesses. Termed micro blogging, once you have an account you are able to subscribe to other member’s Twitter streams. Know of someone that you enjoy reading? Become a “follower” of theirs and every time they publish a “tweet” you’ll see what they have written. The beauty of this system is that the messages are short, and hopefully to a point. The system limits individual tweets to just 140 characters. Letters, numbers, punctuation, spaces, etc.

Originally billed as a service to share what you were doing in that moment, Twitter has now evolved into quite the malleable platform. Depending on your needs, you can probably use the service to provide the ability to get your message across.

It is always important for businesses to take exceptional care of their customers. Unfortunately, in the past the cost associated with providing good customer relationships has prevented many companies from caring whether their clients are happy or not.

Social media communities like Twitter have changed this. For only the cost associated with hiring someone who focuses on monitoring your company’s Twitter stream, you can have instant access to thousands or tens of thousands of individuals. These folks may or may not be existing customers, but one thing is certain: if you are taking advantage of technology like Twitter people are going to take note of you.

There are, of course, caveats. It is not simply good enough to set up a new Twitter account, plaster it on your business cards and other literature, and then forget about it. If you have the channel, and don’t use it, do you really have the channel at all? Perhaps not.

On the other hand, an active presence with your Twitter account provides your company the ability to listen and hear what real people are saying about your products and the services you provide. Things invariably go wrong for your customers. If one of them broadcasts about it to their stream, you have the tools to be notified immediately. Deciding to respond and provide excellent customer service is one of the most powerful applications of using Twitter as a customer relationship management tool.

Now that same client can share with their followers (and those follower’s followers) how well they were treated. These things have a way of spreading around. The days of individuals only having influence over a few people are long gone. Taking advantage of technology this way can help your business get ahead and capture the market share you need to outperform your competition.

2 thoughts on “Tweeting Your Business towards Better Customer Relationships”

  1. This is a great overview of Twitter. Businesses in general and florists in particular really are missing out if they are not on Twitter. It’s such an amazing opportunity to have direct contact with customers and prospective customers. It’s much easier to use than Facebook and the effort goes a long way.

    I think it’s ideal for announcing discounts and deals. Companies can even make use of hash tags and respond to the trending topics if there is a “floral angle” somewhere. During the sentimental holidays — such as Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day — there are often trending topics that florists can capitalize on and make their presence known.

    Yes, as you point out in the article, endless possibilities.

  2. Yeah, having a Twitter channel and actually using it are two different things altogether. You need to build a connection with people even though you have only 140 characters to do it in. Keeping subscribers in the loop and showing them you actually care about them will go a long way. Whenever you need to tweet them an offer they won’t think you are only doing this whole Twitter thing just for the money because you’ve showed them you care.

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