I had an AHA! moment about twitter today, reading yet another blog post about using twitter having some weird example about promoting “flux capacitors” via twitter the author said “users are searching on twitter”.

I realized at that moment that they are not searching on twitter so much as asking their twitter followers for things - I often see people saying “can anyone recommend an X for me?”.

Geography isn’t the same on the internet as it is in the physical world; if you consider each social network to be it’s own community in which referrals, public opinion, and goodwill can be fostered then you can start to understand how standard ideas about business development through geographic regions can be applied to social media.

For example, it’s generally considered to be a good idea to take an existing successful product and sell it into a new geographical region.  Could you make a business from reselling someone’s existing products into the Twitter community, given that the existing customers are not typically Twitter users?

Even if you have a new product or service and you are looking for niches to approach, you could consider the various online communities to each be their own “region” as far as marketing is concerned.  Twitter has an active community of writers, journalists, graphic designers, and techies; if your product/service appeals to this group, or you’re in this group and would be interested in sharing deals and getting referrals, Twitter would be a good choice for a Social Media to engage in.

For my purposes I’ve set up a twitter search using TweetDeck which shows me whenever someone mentions accounting software.  Several times per week it’s something like “Can anyone out there recommend some kind of easy to use small business accounting software?”.  I often send them a quick note with a link to our product, and I also follow them so I can learn more about our target market by reading their tweets.

I initially signed up for twitter because I realized that someone had recommended Clarity Accounting to their Tweeps via twitter (thanks to a TweetBeep search I had set up earlier).  My hope is that I’ll see more of that as time passes, and people will recommend us on a regular basis within the Twitter community.

If you’re wondering whether anyone is asking about products like yours on twitter, just do a search.  If you don’t find anything on twitter, try searching LinkedIn or other networks and blogs. Eventually you might find a relevant online community where you have an interested market looking for your product.

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Tags: business, internet marketing, marketing, social media, social media marketing, twitter

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 9th, 2008 at 1:17 am by Dobes and is filed under Business Insights, Internet Marketing. 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.