How You Can use Twitter to Market Your Small Business

I cam across this interesting article in the New York Times about how Small Businesses are Using Twitter to market their businesses.  A great example – an movable creme brulee cart in San Francisco uses Twitter to send his over 5400 followers his location for the day.  Wow – how cool is that?  And how cool would it be to have 5400 followers – ones who have signed up for you because they really want to know how to buy from you.

A sushi restaurant owner gets up to 5 new customers a night because of Twitter, and uses it to tweet about the specials of the night.  Customers who metnion twitter get a free seaweed salad.

Twitter, for small businesses has become the new word of mouth.   The short 140-character messages are like little updates and can be re-tweeted.  So if you’re a cart owner posting a location, all your fans will see it on their pages, plus they can retweet to all of their friends, thereby increasing the viral aspect of it.

You can also use applications like TweetDeck to help monitor Twitter comments and profiles to find relevant people to follow.

Twitter can also be a great way to announce a sale or a special…especially since you can tweet from a phone.

But the most intersesting thing – is while small business owners are finding ways to make money, the service which is free is still losing money.