Has Twitter Helped My Business?

I first jumped on the Twitter bandwagon back in January shortly before it went mainstream in the UK (which I think was 21/01/2009 when Stephen Fry appeared on Jonathans Ross’ first show after his suspension)

I was asked today if Twitter has helped my business. It’s a question I could answer with one word: yes. But I thought adding a bit more than 140 characters as to why and how might be better than a one-word answer. So let me count the ways:

Sales Leads

There are a reasonable number of sales of our standard accounting software for SMEs that I can trace back directly to Twitter.  But there are also a handful of sales for our higher-value product for accountants too.

So much so that Michelle who is responsible for that side of the business has stopped saying “Less twittering, more working” and now says “Less working, more twittering”.

Closing Sales

Twitter has also helped to time the closing of sales. See my earlier post with the title How Twitter Can Help You Close Sales.

Blog Visitors

According to our logs, you’re probably reading this blog post because someone mentioned it on Twitter. Twitter is the #1 referrer of traffic to this blog. The blog works effectively to get us new customers – so more visitors are a Good Thing.

Crowdsourcing

When I’ve needed recommendations for software or services, a quick post on Twitter throws up a number of responses – saving lots of time independently researching what’s available.

Being Accessible

If you phone the office and ask for me, you have to first get past the gatekeeper. But on Twitter, anyone can reach you. Being easily got to via Twitter has led to a number of interesting opportunities and meeting great people I may not otherwise have met. 

Sorting out our Vodafone issues

See my recent blog post dumping Vodafone. We had a number of problems that built up over the past year, all of which are now sorted. But I’m willing to bet that if it wasn’t for the fact that thousands of people, via Twitter, were reading my post then I’d still be owed closed to a thousand pounds by them and have a load of other issues.

So yes, it would be safe to say that Twitter has been a great help in continuing to build the business. But it also has its downsides!

Tags: startups, Twitter

This entry was posted on Monday, June 15th, 2009 at 8:18 pm and is filed under Small Business, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.