I was meeting with a solo-preneur landscape designer out of Wauwatosa the other day, to discuss a website redesign / redevelopment project they wanted to move forward with, as well as SEO and how to build their brand awareness online. Naturally, social media became a topic of conversation during our time together.
Interestingly enough, and actually a more common view I’ve received of late has been that the business owners are not very “fond” of social media, from a personal perspective. Buy in, of course, to use it for their business becomes that much harder when they don’t like it personally. But, they did raise an interesting question that made me take a step back for a minute to think:
How can we use Twitter to reach users who are not on Twitter?
Well, that’s a novel idea, isn’t it?! How does one use social media, such as Twitter, to target and communicate with users who are inherently not social (her target market is women between the ages of 40-60 years of age, and largely only use the internet for email and basic browsing, not social media). She then further explained that she had read an article that explained how you could use Twitter to send your 140 character messages to your users via SMS (text message). Interesting…
After receiving the URL from her, I do remember this feature being added years ago, but we’ve never had the use case come up where it could be applied, and so of course, I had since forgotten about it. But, I do think it presents a very unique opportunity to easily communicate with your “followers”, without actually needing “followers”, and so I wanted to re-share this information with you.
The great thing is, this relies completely on the shoulders of your users / customers / clients to get set up with, so you really only need to let them know how to “sign up” to receive the tweet texts. Of course, there’s restrictions too, but I’ll list those at the end; first, here’s how one can start receiving texts from a Twitter user, such as your savvy-self:
“Turn On” following of a user via text
Let’s say you want to follow us (who doesn’t, right?), our Twitter handle is “@regalcreative“. All you need to do is:
And that’s it! Simple, right? For more information regarding this topic, go to the official Twitter blog post.
However, as mentioned, there are some slight restrictions to using this with your customers. Firstly, it’ll be important to let them know that they may be charged by their carrier for receiving the texts. Of course, you and Twitter will not be billing them, but depending on their text plan, they may be charged. Secondly, there are API limits, etc. that could get in the way of how often, how many, etc. texts can be sent / received, among other things. For a full look at how Twitter’s “Fast Follow” works, check out their help section.
Update: Some Guidelines for Usage
We were discussing this post with one of our friends on Twitter, @_george_andrews, and some good points were brought up with this being used incorrectly, or becoming more of a spam conductor. We completely agree with George’s thoughts that, if you feel this is a good feature for your business, that you use it wisely. Remember, with great power comes great responsibility. So, do not send out tons of messages in a day just because you know people will receive a text - it will ultimately annoy them, and end up hurting your reputation. Be careful, be wise, and you’ll be good.
Have you used Twitter’s “Fast Follow” features for your business? Were you aware that this was even available? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!
