Why Use Twitter

Why should an enterprise use Twitter? For one thing, it’s a very direct and immediate way to stay con­nect­ed with stakeholders. Here are some other ideas:

• Establish connections with clients and prospects
• Establish your brand online
• Establish your credibility and expertise

Take a poll of your stakeholders — perhaps through your regular newsletter — and ask how many of them use Twitter. You may be surprised at the response. Twitter is used all over the world as an organizing tool for social movements. Its use by the Obama campaign in the 2008 presidential election is a great example of Twitter’s ability to mobilize, energize, and spur people to action.

You can use Twitter to help establish your online brand by making it a reliable source of the latest news pertaining to your products and your business. You may have other methods of keeping your community informed, but nothing beats the timeliness and immediacy of Twitter.

By becoming a trusted voice on Twitter, you can build your credibility and demonstrate your expertise to a larger audience than you are currently reaching. We discuss the demographics of Twitter in more depth in the next section, but there are more than 200 million Twitter accounts,[1] growing at a little less than 10 percent a month. Active Twitters who tweet at least once a month comprise 17 percent of the total, encompassing 10 million to 15 million active tweeters.[2] That represents a large potential audience to which you can spread your message.

Many enterprises have successfully used Twitter to advance their business. But few have realized the extraordinary ROI that Cisco did with its Aggregated Services Router (ASR) product launch.[3] The company went entirely virtual for the launch, shaving six figures off launch expenses delivering the following results:

• 9,000 people attended the social media product launch event – 90 times more attendees than in the past
• Saved 42,000 gallons of gas
• Nearly three times as many press articles as with traditional outreach methods
• More than 1,000 blog posts and 40 million online impressions

Twitter was a key piece of the launch, featuring 108 Cisco feeds with 2 million total followers.

“It was classified as one of the top five launches in company history,” said LaSandra Brill, senior manager, global social media. “It was the crossing the chasm point for us in the adoption phase of social media and helped us get over the hump of internal acceptance.”

These few ideas should get you thinking, throughout the rest of this chapter, about other ways to use this real-time, urgent messaging system.