The Side Note

I’ve written several times about Twitter and its many uses in our industry, but I can’t seem to get enough of the benefits companies are garnering from it. Michael Stelzner of Copyblogger did a nice job recently of outlining a few good examples.

He explains that, according to the State of the Twittersphere report, five to 10 thousand new people join Twitter on a daily basis, and total users are currently around 5 million. That’s a lot of potentially untapped resources!

The article goes on to highlight several high profile and every day business people who use Twitter and have had success with it. Following are a few snippets of what some of those folks had to say:

1)    John Jantsch, Duct Tape Marketing founder – “I get great insight when I ask questions.” And, “People on Twitter spread my thoughts to new places.”
2)    Tony Hsieh, Zappos.com CEO – “In the long term, Twitter helps drive repeat customers and word of mouth, but we’re not looking to it as a way of driving immediate sales.”
3)    David Meerman Scott, bestselling author – “I have personally connected with hundreds of people I otherwise wouldn’t have, and I booked an interview on NPR and a big daily newspaper using Twitter.”
4)    Brian Clark, Copyblogger – “Twitter Search is an amazing way to see what people are saying about your products or services.”
5)    Terri Rylander, B2B copywriter – “I’ve been in my particular niche for over 10 years and know who the players are (though they don’t know me). When I checked who [a colleague] was following on Twitter, there they all were! It read like a ‘Who’s Who’ list.”
6)    Pam O’Neil, BreakingPoint VP of Marketing – “A writer for ZDNet wrote about us and linked to us based on something we tweeted and that resulted in a huge spike in web traffic and at least one deal with a major service provider.”

If you’re like me and you want to see how companies are using Twitter successfully, or if you’re still trying to figure out what Twitter is all about and how it can benefit your company, I encourage you to visit some of the abovementioned folks on Twitter. Read their tweets for a few weeks and note what they’re talking about. It may inspire you start Twittering or step up your Twitter game!