My Customers Don't Use Twitter, Why Should I? @Pistachio Explains.

Laura " @Pistachio " Fitton presented a fantastic webinar for Inbound Marketing University about the business benefits of Twitter . (Laura is a famous Twitter Queen, founder of the first Twitter for Business consultancy , co-author of Twitter for Dummies , and creator of a new Twitter applications startup .)  You can watch her IMU webinar here .

One of the major questions that she addressed in her presentation was,  " If my best leads and potential customers aren't on Twitter, why on earth should I be on Twitter? "

Laura has concisely determined five "off-platform benefits" of Twitter, even if you aren't using it to communicate with leads and customers directly.

Here are her five points summarized from the above video:

1) Twitter Page SEO: In her words, "Just search for Pistachio ." It's a common word, but Laura dominates the search rankings. By being active on Twitter and having a Twitter handle that is a word people will search for, most likely it will rank well. 

2) Research: Use Twitter as a platform to gather consumer research on your product or industry. What are people saying about your company? Recruit research groups or host a live survey using a hashtag!

3) Content Generation Engine: You don't need your own Twitter account to collect the content that people are generating. Set up a widget on your website that aggregates tweets about your company, industry, or anything your non-Twitter customers might find interesting. Madonna collects the content her fans create about her and uses it to add fresh content to her website.

4) Word-of-Mouth "Passalong": Utilize the viral nature of Twitter and start a campaign that people will talk about on and offline. When Dell gave out coupons on Twitter, Twitter-users passed along the coupons to folks outside of their online networks too. 

5) PR Gravity: Lots of journalists use Twitter as a tool to search for people to interview for news stories. Stop pitching; instead, create interesting and informative content. Journalists who need your expertise will find you on their own.

Laura's final takeway: Make sure you're using Twitter and social media in a way that is unselfish. Serve your community by being helpful. Learn, listen, care, and serve!

Can you think of any other off-platform benefits of Twitter? 

Webinar: Twitter for Marketing and PR