Steve Sharman at Carrara Village Newsa makes excellent use of Twitter to promote his business. Check out his posts and see for yourself. Twitter is free. It is like a megaphone since your tweets are available to those who follow you and can be found by anyone doing a search or via hashtags.
The evidence does not support you ‘cuddles’. There are 2 million Twitter users in Australia. But that is okay. The fewer newsagents using the platform the more attention for those who do.
‘Cuddles’ or should I say Glenn D, that you are invested enough to spend time here talking about something you say is not relevant suggests otherwise. If newsagents do get value from Twitter why do you care?
‘Cuddles’ / Glenn D you are using a couple of names. It is relevant and, yes, does go to trust.
I think people will take more notice of opinions shared when they come with a real name attached.
On Twitter, hold your opinion by all means. It’s free and takes next to no time to engage so why you are invested in talking it down dos not make commercial sense.
For the record, I know of newsagents and other specialty retailers leveraging Twitter to the value of their business.
‘Cuddles’ / Glenn D I am no expert. I still don;t get why you are energised to talk the free platform down – if it is as useless as you say.
It is free. It gives you a voice outside your business. All you need is one person noticing and that is better than you have today.
Mark,
Leaving aside Cuddles split personality and being so anti twitter when he/she clearly has more understanding of the twitter platform than most of us, I do feel there is another underlying issue here.
Most of us are sole operators. We work long hours in the business and given the opportunity, we would all like to work more on the business.
We get the importance of regularly changing displays, of cross merchandising, of facebook, instagram et al.
We frequently work all day Sunday and public holidays, because we cannot afford penalty rates. No matter what the effective hourly rate is, we are compelled to work to make any contribution we can towards our landlord’s demands.
We do not have the luxury of support staff to merchandise, market, blog, twitter etc etc. Instead we waste precious hours on magazines and newspapers for little return.
In short,we prioritise our time to further our business, as best we can given our individual customer base and finite hours available.
Twitter ? Maybe, but Cuddles is correct, most customers have no clue what it is. So in scheduling priorities and considering best uses for our precious time, Twitter, is way way down the list.
I am about to embark on the twitter journey. I utilise Facebook for the business and it is really successful as it communicates with “non traditional” customers. As a retailer I feel I need to make my business visible in as many channels as possible. If you want to grow your business you need to find new customers and using social media is a cheap and easy way to do this. I know a lot of people who use twitter and they are not under 25!!
I have found Twitter to be the best platform for promoting my business I also have a Facebook page & Instragram account. Yes the followers who are actual regular customers are very few but that is missing the point, it is in retweets from magazines that drive extra sales. One example is the book ‘Daring & Distrubtive’ by Lisa Messenger – I posted a tweet promoting it which was retweeted to Lisa’s 16,000 followers saying where to buy on the Gold Coast leading to selling 11 copies @ $29.95.
Not all publishers retweet but many do to their usually large following..
I usually spend about 10 minutes updating the account in between serving early morning customers which is not a great deal of time..
Steve,
Interesting. I need to re-evaluate.
If at first you don’t succeed ……..
thx