More and More Small Businesses Are Now Using Twitter to Market Themselves

More and more small businesses are benefiting from the use of Twitter to enhance their marketing efforts, according to an article in the New York Times on July 22 titled, "Mom and Pop Operators Turn to Social Media."

Though there has been a lot of publicity about the use of Twitter by large companies such as Dell and Starbucks, the article points out that "today, small businesses outnumber the big ones" on Twitter, and "in many ways Twitter is an even more useful tool for them."

"For many mom-and-pop shops with no ad budget, Twitter has become their sole means of marketing," the article states. "It is far easier to set up and operate a Twitter account than to maintain a Web page. And because small-business owners tend to work at the cash register, not in a cubicle in the marketing department, Twitter's intimacy suits them well."

Anamitra Banerjee, who manages commercial products at Twitter, said that when he joined the company in March, "I thought this was a place where large businesses were. What I'm finding more and more, to my surprise every single day, is business of all kinds."

Twitter, which does not yet make money, is now concentrating on teaching businesses how they can join and use it, Mr. Banerjee said, and the company plans to publish case studies. He is also developing products that Twitter can sell to businesses of all sizes this year, including features to verify businesses' accounts and analyze traffic to their twitter profiles.

According to Mr. Banerjee, small-business owners like Twitter because they can talk directly to customers in a way that they were only able to do in person before. "We're finding the emotional distance between businesses and their customers is shortening quite a bit," he said.