In a previous installment, we discussed small businesses using Twitter as a tool for self promotion. In that article I pointed out how such a tool would be used differently by different types of small businesses. We looked at one class of small business and one thing they might do to correctly use Twitter to best advantage.

Photo credit: Richie Diesterheft

Today let’s look more closely at the messages that might be tweeted and their intended audience.

The message is the tweets you send out as a small business.

Every small business that uses Twitter has at least two intended audiences:

• Previous customers
• Potential customers

Most businesses don’t think much about the distinction but the messages you send to each of these two groups may be different at least some of the time.

I’m going to broadly define previous customers as anyone who has interacted with your business before. They may have bought something from you, or they may just have inquired. You may have given them an estimate or they may have crossed your path at some networking event. Maybe they even just signed up for your mailing list at some point.

The real point is that these are people with whom you already have some kind of preexisting relationship. You already know who these people are before you compose and send your tweets.

When you send tweets out to these people, your main goal is to cultivate the relationship. You want to keep yourself in their minds and encourage them to come back or to refer others to you.

Potential customers are essentially strangers who you are hoping will find you by serendipity and become interested enough to come patronize, or at least check out, your business.

You would not adopt the same level of familiarity with potential customers as you might with existing customers.

Potential customers may want to know more about your business: its history, offerings, range of products, guarantees, etc. They will need to become familiar with you and grow to trust you before moving from potential to actual customers.

Existing customers already know enough of that information to be comfortable buying from you so they may be more interested in ideas for getting more or better use out of the products they’ve already bought from you. They may want to know when a new feature or option becomes available.

With both groups, you want to do more than simply try to sell.

Selling is a turn-off that will make most people direct their attention (and often their money) elsewhere.

So what do you do?

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution to that.

The nature of your business may dictate different styles. In general helpful, interesting, funny, mysterious or unexpected bits of information will generate fascination and interest. These carry the dual benefit of being retweetable, thus increasing your exposure. (And helping your goal of attracting more potential customers.)

Beyond that, you really need the custom-tailored advice of an expert. I’ll give you three guesses where you can find one.

Click any of the icons below to retweet these passages from the above article.

Remember, we’ll donate money to charity for every retweet. No purchase necessary. You retweet, we donate. It’s that simple.

 The Wrong Way to Twitter

 Every small business that uses Twitter has at least two intended audiences.

 When you send tweets out to these people, your main goal is to cultivate the relationship.

 These are essentially strangers who you are hoping will find you by serendipity.

 You would not adopt the same level of familiarity with potential customers as with existing customers.

 Selling is a turn-off that will make most people direct their attention (and their money) elsewhere.

A friend came to me recently asking about using Twitter as a means to promote a small business to local customers. After a short conversation, he began to realize how complex something so simple can be.

There is definitely a wrong way to use Twitter.

Photo credit: ExStress Yourself, on Flickr

Let’s look at some examples.

First understand that there are different kinds of small business. One type is a business for whom geography is unimportant. Either they do much of their selling online or they primarily ship their products. We won’t be talking about those kinds of businesses today.

The other kind is those whose primary clientele is local; paint stores, dry cleaners, car lots and the like. A customer patronizing this type of business will visit his local store and not one three states away.

Even for these types of businesses, locality matters. If you are in a small town relatively isolated from any larger towns, online advertising of most types (I’m speaking very broadly here so this includes Twitter as a form of “online” advertising) will be generally ineffective. The locals who will do business with you will almost all find you one of three ways:

1. They’ve been doing business with you for years and already have an ongoing relationship with you.
2. They will ask their friends, who will refer you.
3. You are the only game in town so locals who need what you’ve got will have few options but to find you and do business with you.

That leaves small business in large cities and those in what I will loosely call suburban areas. Much of the east and west coasts of the United States tend to be a patchwork of humongous suburban areas. For example, I live more than 40 miles from Center City Philadelphia, however the greater Philadelphia metropolitan area extends a little over 50 miles to the south of the city, at least as far north and just about as far west. That’s roughly 500 square miles of basically uninterrupted metropolis.

That metropolis, and countless others just like it, may include hundreds of small towns but they all sort of run together. It’s an easy matter for a customer to shop two, three, even ten towns over.

It is in these cases where online advertising and social media prove their worth. Provided it’s done correctly.

The internet and social media are worldwide platforms. If your customer base is all within 30 miles or so of your business location (realistically, it is) then reaching prospects three states away, or three countries away, is not helpful to your business.

Because of the very low cost of online advertising, most businesses don’t bother with targeting but that’s a mistake. Not only do untargeted efforts lead to excessive online “noise”, but they can also lead to costs; both real and reputational.

So the first step is to write your tweets in such as way as to make them targeted and searchable. One of the easiest ways to do that is to add the name of your town in a hashtag, like this: #[town name]

A hashtag is a word you are explicitly marking as being ultra searchable. The implication is that it’s highly relevant to your tweets.

In the next installment, we’ll look another huge distinction that many small businesses fail to recognize. It will make all the difference in what you tweet and how you do it.

Click any of the icons below to retweet these passages from the above article.

Remember, we’ll donate money to charity for every retweet. No purchase necessary. You retweet, we donate. It’s that simple.

 There is definitely a wrong way to use Twitter.

 For these types of businesses, locality matters.

 Those who do business with you will almost all find you one of three ways…

 The east and west coasts of the United States tend to be a patchwork of…

 That metropolis, and countless others just like it, may include…

 It’s an easy matter for a customer to shop two, three, even ten towns over.

 If your customer base is within 30 miles of you then [this] is not helpful.