The current edition of the Nashville Business Journal has a good story on small businesses using Twitter as a marketing tool. While the entrepreneurs in the story appear to have a good grasp of the medium and how to use it, the NBJ story makes the same mistake so many publications do when they cover this angle: they make it sound so easy that any small business that uses Twitter will see a surge of new customers and sales.
But that’s not so. In fact, Twitter and other social media are no more guaranteed-successful as marketing tools than are television and radio ads, or newspaper ads, or billboards. And not all forms of media are the right tools for all kinds of businesses. Twitter is more appropriate for some businesses than others – and for some entrepreneurs than others. For the others, the right tool might be a blog, or a media relations effort to secure free media coverage, or some combination of free, paid and social media.
Read the NBJ’s story here: Businesses using Twitter to build brand, bring in customers.
