This interesting article was published on Sunday about Twitter by Robert Scoble on his infamous blog, Scobleizer. For those not familiar with Scoble, besides his blogs, he’s a published author and technical evangelist who previously worked at Microsoft and for Fast Company as a video blogger. Anyhow in this particular post he is saying that Twitter is underhyped and worth $5-10 billion dollars.
He believes Twitter has taken over the business world and that businesses are seeing real ROI but aren't sharing that publicly. He points out that Twitter is really the only place online that you can reach the richest and most educated customers.
I had a discussion just today with a business associate over lunch in which I suggested trying out Twitter to gain him some new business. He currently has been using Google AdWords for business leads and while I agree that paid search is a great tool for this, it should not be his only marketing tactic. He said that he thought only consumers were on Twitter looking to follow celebrities. So while celebrities do love using Twitter, I told him that the majority of who I follow and who follow me are other business professionals, many in marketing and social media, and like Robert Scoble, technical evangelists.
Now while I lately have been hyping Facebook as great for business, as Robert says, Facebook doesn't have a way for you to track all mentions of your business. On Twitter if anybody replies to me or retweets something of mine I will see "@ddeclemente" and be able to connect with that person. Facebook doesn't offer this one very simple tool.
The big thing that Twitter has that Facebook doesn’t is Twitter Search. Tweets are accessible for days while on Facebook once they aren’t on your home page they're gone. With Twitter you can search “Rochester” and see all the tweets that include that word. This is in real time which is something Google can’t provide either. Or you can use the hashtag #ROC in your search which identifies a tweet that is relevant to Rochester.
So I do believe I was successful from my lunch conversation today. We decided to build a Twitter page for his business and test it out for a couple of months. I sent him Robert’s article as well to further bring home the point. I’ll let you all know how successful we are in a couple of months.
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