“Our Customers are not on Twitter” – Shutup!

“Our customers are not on Twitter”  If I hear that phrase one more time, I’m going to go crazy.  I’ve heard it so often, I’ve seen other people blog about it and I’ve heard people talk about their stories as well.  Understandably CEO’s or whoever is over looking your bottom line figures want to see results.  Unfortunately, you will most likely not see direct results from social media.  But we all know indirectly it is helping.

Depending on the industry you are in, you may have an elderly demographic and your boss may feel that these people are not on Twitter.  I disagree with this, but let’s just say that they aren’t on Twitter.  Does that mean that they are the only ones that purchase or look to purchase items for themselves?  They may not be on Twitter, but their children or grandchildren are more likely to be there.  It now turns into a word of mouth type marketing, which your analytics is not going to show Twitter.com as your traffic source, but indirectly it was.

Just for this reason alone it is critical to be involved in social media.  I try to compare social media to newsletters that are sent out to your customer base.  Most successful companies have newsletters, useful newsletters.  Do you think that you would have a followship of your newsletter if every time it was sent out it had nothing but ads and sales offers?  Probably not.  So why would you have your tweets consist of only this material?

There are plenty of other reasons to be involved in social media and you hear it all day long from all the other experts. But this one excuse irritates me more than any other. Customer satisfaction, customer service, research and development, competition, these are all reasons to be active on Twitter.
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