HOWTO: Twitter for Startups (Part 1)

Last time I stated my working hypothesis that Twitter allows for more intimate and meaningful conversations with customers, even if it doesn't offer marketers the scale (# of users) or amount of structured data (profile content) that Facebook does. This time, I thought I'd go a little deeper and find some examples of startups using Twitter in what I think are effective ways. (Note: this is not applicable to mega-brands. I'm writing with the intended audience being a startup that's still trying to find itself and discover what its customers really want.)

One of the more interesting ways I think people are using Twitter is as an interface to their product/service. Aardvark (a social search service that mines your social network for someone who's knowledgeable about your query, and then asks them to answer it) actually uses Twitter as an input. You can tweet @vark and you'll get a human-generated response from your network within minutes. Pretty sweet:



Another great use of Twitter is to as a feed for new content on your site. One, it means you're searchable (on Twitter, and any search engines (Bing, Google) with which they have a deal). Two, it means you can see who follows you (a way of discovering your customers and learning about them). Three, your customers can stay tuned in with minimum effort -- they don't have to go back to your webpage to get updates from you. Daylife is a local startup that is a news aggregation service. They frequently post their cover story:



Okay, great. You put your content out there, some people are following you. Chances are, though, that even more people have mentioned you, but didn't even know you were on Twitter. Pretend, for a moment, that you're hunch.com -- go discover your customers:



Now that you've got some folks talking about you, why not show off those conversations as real-time testimonials by retweeting them: