marketing strategies & Twitter

I have already wrote in the past about potential commercial uses of Twitter. I wanted to translate a great article about how to use Twitter for marketing purposes. This blog gives us 8 potential uses of the micro-blogging platform to boost a marketing strategy. I reordered them, gathering some of them, to give you my version:

• Customer care: companies could use Twitter to deal with customer complains or technical issues. This is a fast way to manage customer crisis. (example: Comcast)
  
  
• Corporate communication: you could use Twitter as a way to communicate. The idea is to use Twitter for your corporate communication. This idea is mainly dedicated to newspapers corporation, but nevertheless, it could be used for some other companies with the need to communicate fast and with a large spectrum of information.
  As most of the bloggers own a Twitter account to complete their blog, some corporate blogs could use it the same way. This is somehow the same idea of micro-journalism: embrace the new medium to strengthen the company's communication.
  A good example, once again I would say, is the Barrack Obama campaign. This campaign is a great example of how to use the media Internet. Moreoever, Barrack Obama owns a Twitter, where you can be kept informed of the different activity of the Democrat's leader.
  
  
• Promotion: The idea is to use Twitter to send promotional offers, or coupons to users. This could be a good idea, but I believe it would imply for the user to have a specific account dedicated to "promotional Twitter feeds". This use is actually in a great correlation with the Vendor marketing idea: the user decide to subscribe to a feed that will give him some discounts on brands he likes. But however, it is very not likely this use will spring up. (example: Dell)
  
  
• Buzz marketing: You could use Twitter to start your buzz marketing campaign. A lot of people use it for that matters. It could be nice, but so far I did not see a creative example.
  
  
• Advertising through Twitter: Twitter has not really set up its business model, and how it will cash in the product. Nevertheless we can expect some advertisement formats to spring up, to turn the website profitable. In that case, Twitter advertisement will become a way to support your marketing strategy. The question will be what kind of targeting tools Twitter will propose to marketing managers, and also where the commercials will be (banners, inside the feeds?)

As you can see, the magnificent potential of the platform could drive some marketers to use it in different ways to support their marketing strategies. I believe we are still in an obscure period of development for Twitter, which is still struggling with technical issues, and even though some success stories exist, there is still room to define the Twitter use for marketing purpose.

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