Twitter or Facebook Which Is Relevant in The UK For Local Businesses?

by Denise

Twitter or Facebook Which Is Relevant in The UK For local businesses?

Twitter is a alledgedly taking the world by storm. In the true sense of the word, Twitter is simply a phenomenon. Though not as big yet in the UK compared to the US it can afford local business owners a possible opportunity to levarage what they do.

The number one social media site in the UK is still Facebook. Even Jessica Ennis our new world champion uses it to communicate with friends! WAsn’t she amazing last night. A great lesson in just focussing on your goal.

Clients often ask us which one they should use. We always say it depends on your market and in preference both!

Social media is a new phenomenon and in reality is here to stay. Better to get in line with it now and put yourself ahead of the competition. This is especially so for smaller SME type businesses as you will really be able to differentiate yourself and penetrate potentially many new markets and target groups.

Back to Twitter.Shortly after its launch, it was unusual to “tweet” about daily doings, but as more and more people have discovered the power of Twitter, everyone from Stephen fry to the new US president twitters. Many people and local business owners especially are unsure of its value versus the time spent twittering. In another part of the blog I have talked about ten possible advantages.

With more and more clients asking questions it is worth putting Twitter into perspective.

What’s Twitter? In short, it’s another form of social networking, but one that takes less time and less involvement than Facebook or MySpace. Because each post is limited to 140 characters (that’s characters, not words), the idea is to be sharp, crisp and to the point.

Here’s how businesses can use Twitter to their advantage

Linking and Free List Building

Users can put a link to their website in their profile, not just in posts. So as people visit a user’s page, they might see the link, click on it and increase that site’s page views. Plus if you have an offer of a free report or useful information a prospective client might just click through. This in theory is no cost compared to PPC.

Commenting

Those who are serious about getting the word out are not only good about posting their own comments, but will reply to other people’s comments. They might simply say, “great idea!”, but doing so puts their tweets on those who follow the person they are commenting to. Before they know it, they have more followers, and that’s more potential customers.

Encouraging connections

Some businesses put a widget on their web page that suggests others “follow me on Twitter” . Which helps encourgae connections and enable people to find out about you.

Reputation Management

Reputation management of you and your company online is becoming a big thing. Twitter has a high page rank, which means google basically likes it. If you have a twitter account and someone googles your name it is highly likely you will appear.

Try it and see. If you google me Sharon Newey you will see Twitter and my profile about half way down.

There are many ways to leverage the power of Twitter. The key is to be smart, be ahead of the game and be willing to try new things. Twitter and many of the assorted applications can give smart business people all of these things.

Now Facebook is another different way of connecting with potential clients. From having your own account and user name through to creating a face book fan page. The subject of another post I think!

Have some fun with it,

Enjoy the rest of your week,

Best Wishes

Sharon

This article was changed slightly to a uk perspective an inspired by Jed at “http://www.webdefineit.com

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