Are You Ready to Live the Tweet Life?

October 14 , 2009

The potential of social media channels like Twitter has not been lost on local businesses and environmentally-focused companies. After all, what could be more earth friendly than replacing print communications with fast and easy electronic information sharing? But these groups are also discovering that social media platforms make sharing information with their audiences easier than ever.

In Hallmark’s July GreenLight we ran a third-party story titled, Should Sustainable Brands Tweet? A good point was made in the article that applies not only to sustainable businesses, but to all businesses. Any company not involved in some kind of online social network has a blind spot that will be increasingly apparent to their customers.

Tweets of Tampa Bay

As an example of local activity, here’s a quick snapshot of what Tampa Bay organizations are doing with Twitter, one of the most popular social media platforms.

• Pinellas Economic Development promotes workshops and retweets business news to its Twitter followers.
• The Upper Tampa Bay Regional Chamber of Commerce uses Twitter to promote events, businesses and stories posted to their online community, the Oldsmar News.
• The US Green Building Council, which has an active local presence, uses Twitter to promote workshops available in Tampa Bay, gather information, offer online courses and spread the word on new green guidelines.
• And finally, Hallmark Development uses Twitter to promote green building stories, list available properties, promote special offers and remind followers about our referral program. Click here to follow us.

Tools of the Twitter Trade

Without the apps that have sprung up around Twitter, it wouldn’t be near as effective as it has become. You can get a list of apps from Twitter. This is a list worth perusing once you’ve created your Twitter account, but in the interest of time, we’ve selected a few that stand out from the crowd.

• For all the Twitterphobes out there, a good place to start is Twitteroid.com. Download the free tutorial and you’ll be mastering Twitter in 10 minutes or less. If this still seems overwhelming, call our friends at Springboard Marketing for some assistance managing your outreach.

• For Real Estate brokers or sales professionals, there’s a sweet application called Tweetlister. This is a free service where you can register your available properties and select the frequency of the tweet. An easy to use application creates the listing – all you need to do is fill in the blanks. You will need a Twitter username and password, but those are easy to create and worth the few minutes of your time to set up.

• An application called OutTwit incorporates Twitter seamlessly into Outlook. You can archive and manage tweets the same way you manage email. OutTwit also has the ability to shorten urls via tinyurl. (Because tweets are limited to 140 characters, shortening urls is essential when pointing to a blog or story online.) OutTwit also provides visual graphs that reflect your Twitter usage statistics.