Creative Ways To Promote Your Local Business Using Twitter

Business owners have discovered a wide range of ways to use Twitter for promotion purposes. For example, press releases, customer service, event updates, news updates, project updates, market research, new blog posts, special offers, recruitment etc.

They’re all good ideas and can work well if carried out in the correct manner. But they’ve been written about thousands of times across the internet.

So with that in mind, we’ve gathered together a selection of creative techniques that you can use to promote your local business using Twitter. We’ve also dreamt up a few of our own ideas, so continue reading and let us know what you think.

Here goes…

Once you build a list of local followers, Twitter is an amazing tools that you can use to let people know about;

a) Location

If you have a mobile business that moves around a local area, you will attract customers who happen to notice your presence. But what about the people who want to buy something from you but don’t know where you are at any given moment? Twitter to the rescue.

The Twitter user Waffletruck is a company that sells waffles around the streets of New York. Their tweets are used to notify their followers of their current location.

This real-time service lets people know when the Waffle truck is nearby and helps to boost the local demand for Waffles.

Likewise, the enterprising owner of an ice-cream van has used Twitter to let their followers know where they are throughout the day.

b) Vacancy

It’s also possible to use Twitter to let your followers know about the vacancy of a service that you provide.

For example, LaundryRoom uses Twitter to help the West Hall residents at Olin College’s know when the campus Laundromat has machines available. Whenever a machine becomes vacant, a tweet is used to notify the students who have followed the account.

This creative use of Twitter helps these students to find a vacant machine and helps to balance the demand for the services of the laundry room.

Likewise, it’s possible to see how this technique could be used to let local people know when other services are vacant, such as apartments to rent, parking lots etc.

c) Readiness

Another local use of Twitter is to let people know when something is ready. For example, you may have seen it mentioned elsewhere that a bakery has linked their oven to Twitter. Whenever a new batch of freshly baked produce is ready, the system automatically posts a message to Twitter to inform their followers.

This is another powerful example of providing a genuine service for customers (telling them when they can get hot, fresh baking) that will help to boost demand for your products.

It’s also possible to imagine a virtually unlimited number of ways that you could link physical sensors to your twitter account. Click here for an example involving a pot plant. These could work in both directions, either the physical sensor (for example a temperature gauge on a beach) posting a tweet to your account (to increase demand for your sun-bed hire business) or your Twitter account being used to control a physical object (someone has build a system that allows them to control their house lighting etc from anywhere in the world, by posting certain commands to their Twitter account). We’ll leave that up to you to decide how that could be used for marketing purposes.

d) Queues

All businesses have times when they’re busy and periods when they’re not so busy. Likewise, some people will do almost anything to avoid waiting in a queue. So wouldn’t it be great if you could use Twitter to inform your followers about the number of people in your store?

It may even be possible to link the electronic counter on the doors of your store to your Twitter account so that you can automatically post regular tweets (perhaps every 15 mins) to let people know how many people are in your store.

Your followers who don’t appreciate having to wait in long queues, would then be able to visit your store when you have fewer customers. This will help to balance the demand for staff attention within your store.

This technique could be used to inform your followers about the length of queue in almost any situation, for example, at the barber shop, the queues for different rides at a theme park etc.

e) Last Minute Availability

Sometimes, due to certain reasons such as cancellation, there are spaces available on flights/coaches, rooms available in hotels and spaces available in your appointment book.

Whatever business/service you operate, Twitter can be used to fill these unexpected vacancies. A simple tweet gives your followers the opportunity to book a last minute appointment/flight/vacation etc, possibly at a reduced price and it allows you to fill up space that may otherwise be wasted.

One of the major secrets about using Twitter as a marketing tool is to provide people with information that they really care about (shorter queues, vacant washing machines, fresh baking etc). People are constantly asking themselves, either consciously or subconsciously, “What’s in it for me?”

You can modify and extend these techniques to suit almost any purpose. So let these ideas set your creative juices flowing. The only limit is your imagination.

What creative techniques have you used to promote your business using Twitter? How successful were they? Share your thoughts using the comment system below.

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