TRACK EVERY SALE. Sure, Twitter’s relatively cheap, but you still want to know you’re getting something for the human effort. Naked Pizza’s point-of-sale system codes the origin of every order — was it from a specific coupon or a box topper? — which allowed it to calculate that a recent “Tweetie Pie” Twitter promotion, accounted for 15% of his shop’s revenue on the day it ran.
TWITTER IS NOT FACEBOOK. Twitter is more immediate — if a person doesn’t check their Twitter feed for an hour she could easily miss the message. Berry Chill CEO Michael Farah uses Twitter for real-time communication (“Spotted: Justin Timberlake at Berry Chill!”) and Facebook for longer-lead calls to action, like enlisting focus-group volunteers.
CREATE A CONVERSATION. Don’t blast promotions incessantly. Intersperse them with other nuggets of wisdom or news related to your products and industry or neighborhood. Or, if you have a broader social mission, use Twitter to communicate that. Naked Pizza co-founder Jeff Leach suggests that if these kinds of social technologies become game changers, there may be a day when companies’ initial business plans take into consideration whether they have anything worth microblogging.
SELL LAST-MINUTE INVENTORY. Twitter’s immediacy is its biggest strength — so use it to pump up business during lulls or discount last-minute unsold goods, said Zack Steven, co-founder of LocalTweeps, a local Twitter directory, who caught same-day discounted tickets at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis via Twitter.
ALERT FOLLOWERS WHEN YOU’RE ON THE GO. Venture capitalist Fred Wilson likes to point to KogiBBQ, a Korean taco truck that drives around Los Angeles, alerting its almost 20,000 followers to its current and future locations via a Twitter feed.
taken from : http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=136662
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