Ways to Use Twitter & Facebook to Build Communities & Generate Business

Twitter & Facebook have been at the centre stage as far as consumer internet is concerned. Tens of thousands of blog posts have been done all around the world citing the importance of these & various other social media tools which companies can leverage to connect to their customers directly. In this post i would like to cover some ways using which companies can build communities & generate business via social media tools mainly twitter & facebook. These were presented earlier by my colleague Pradeep Chopra at 'Gripel Social Media Marketing Excellence' and a very high profile 'Click Asia Summit'. Both these events were held in Mumbai.

Here's the gist of these presentations:

1. Twitter can be utilized by businesses first of all to listen the existing conversation going on among consumers about their brands. They should also track the conversation going on about the competitors. This will help in two ways. One is that you will come to know pros & cons of your products & services and how the consumers think of you. Second is that you will come to know about the weaknesses (which you can take advantage of) or strengths (which you can emulate or surpass) of your competitors. Apart from listening, also participate in the conversation & actively engaging with the consumers.

2. Twitter & Facebook both can be used for online reputation management. You can avoid disasters simply by being alert about online conversations about you. In fact you can convert the potential criticizers into great evangelists if you can solve their problems quickly & on time. And it helps to spread the word online very quickly. So, manually tracking the online conversations about your brand is a great necessity these days. Several tools are also available for this purpose but all of them have certain limitations.

3. The way Dell has done business worth millions of dollars via Twitter is a case study in itself. Similarly several small businesses are also doing business via twitter these days. One good indian example is Pune & Mumbai based Faaso's restaurant. They have an interesting Tweet-to-Order business model which is a great success in these two places. So, definitely, businesses can look forward to exploring twitter as an additional touch point to do the business. And it helps spread the word very fast if consumers like your products. Similarly various brands are doing business via their facebook pages.

Rest of the article with detailed examples & slides can be found out here.