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Video Transcript: You can’t just put up a Twitter page and then let it sit there and hope that you’re going to get 100,000 followers overnight. I talked about using it more productively. This is all in terms of using it for local business. The people who attended the previous workshop know I have a different stance when I’m building my own personal brand. But building a brand for local business, use it for engaging with clients, keeping them informed about what’s going on and keeping them up with industry news, pretty much just showing that you’re on the cutting edge.
Do you have any other points with the way that you think local business could use Twitter?
Pete: Look, I think, this is my personal perspective. I think for local business, Twitter is not a great thing. I think where it will work really well is where you can actually do search streams based on the country the tweets are coming from.
To give that a bit of a context, we were having a chat before in one of the breaks before about for people like Telstra and Medibank Private and some of these big companies that are basically Australia-based brands. So they can actually target and search Twitter for anytime that Telstra is mentioned or the Commonwealth Bank is mentioned. They get in that conversation and make sure it’s not negative and be responsive and so on. That’s where I think Twitter works really well.
For small niche businesses like masseuses and so on, you can definitely get on there and look for terms about back pain and say, oh, here’s a quick idea and tip. But that’s not actually going to be seen by people in the Australian area. It’s not the best ROI of your time.
I think once you can actually start going to the search results part of Twitter and actually target a stream for back pain or dentist or whatever it may be, or keywords that only come from Australian Twitters and then interact with those people, that’s where it will get really powerful for small business.
I think where it can work well is just to build some market leadership. If you’re trying to position yourself as a market leader in a particular space and you have 10,000, 20,000 followers on Twitter, and you’re talking about that and you’re starting the conversation around the world, and you are engaging and being the thought leader in that space, you can then get a lot of prestige and expert status from that. You’ll be interviewed on other people’s blogs. You’ll be maybe asked to speak at the national physio workshop and so on.
Then if you put that back on your website, ‘speaking at recently and keynote speaker here’, it’s going to give you more authority and expert status. So you can charge higher prices and get increased conversions. As a direct ROI, I don’t think it’s the greatest thing yet. Definitely for consumer material it is a bit different.
Foursquare
David: Another thing definitely worth having a look at, though, if you’re on local business internet marketing, is an app that’s popping up. It’s huge in the States, it’s going to catch on here. It’s already starting to catch on, called foursquare. Go ahead, register your business there. It’s pretty easy.
Head over to foursquare.com. Get yourself an account. Search for your particular business. If it hasn’t got a listing, create one. Then what you can actually do is, it’s one of these location-based apps that are appearing on the phones. What people are doing, it’s all the rage to check in somewhere, that’s what you do on foursquare.
If I’m down at the local pub, I might go ‘at the Corner Hotel’ and anyone who follows me on Facebook sees I’ve got my foursquare filters straight into my Facebook. So you’ll see sometimes it will pop-up, it’ll say, hey, Dave’s down at the Corner Hotel having a beer with Tim or whatever the case may be. That’s how people are using it.
How do you use it as a local business? You can start to do things where you encourage people to check in at your local business. The person who checks in the most ends up getting mayor status, and you become mayor of a particular area. You might be mayor of Bell City. You might be mayor of the dentist in South Yarra. You might be mayor of whatever and once you claim your listing. You can give mayors special discounts. This works extremely well if you’re in things like nightclubs or Starbucks.
Pete: It did really well in the US. You can basically go and check into a different Starbucks location and the mayor of Starbucks gets half price Starbucks while they’re mayor. You log in and show them your iPhone that you’re currently mayor of this particular location, and you get half price Starbucks. It’s very competitive because people go back to the Starbucks and check in again. And it’s all based on where you are. So I can’t be sitting here and say I’m checking into Starbucks in San Diego. You have to actually be there in the right geolocation of your local small business marketing effort and it’s all part of that.
It comes back to what we were saying before. The question is how this new search is going to change. I don’t use foursquare. I find it a bit of a distraction personally. But for a lot of people, if I’m in a new town in Sydney for example and I’ve got a lot of friends who are on foursquare, I’d go on to foursquare and check where all my friends have been going to eat in Sydney. You can go restaurants in Sydney, where have my friends been going and it will show me the restaurants my friends go to and check into regularly. Scott’s the mayor of this particular restaurant. He must go there once every three weeks or once every two weeks. I’ll go there to eat. It’s that sort of search that is going to change the world.
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