So what’s all the noise about Twitter and what do all these tweets mean for business? Well it seems that everyone is signing up and hopping on this bird of a bandwagon.. (even I have signed up for my own account)..  but I often wonder is it just a bandwagon or has it become a new standard for communication. I suppose only time will tell. In the meantime I feel it is best to adapt and adopt before you choose to skip the bandwagon and in the end miss the boat.

In my attempt to explore effective ways for small businesses to use the service I came across  CoTweet - a service developed specifically as a platform that helps companies reach and engage customers using Twitter. Used by some of the biggest brands in the business - (Ford, Whole Foods, Coca Cola, Starbucks – to name a few) – CoTweet boasts multiple users & multi-account posting, brand monitoring, conversation threading, click tracking and tweet scheduling, as well as other services that work together to create a robust CRM application. As they put it  “Think of it as social CRM — with an emphasis on the ’social’.”

Currently the service is in its beta stage and is free to use. Because of that I took advantage of this opportunity and give it a whirl. Where I think it has the most initial value for small businesses is in its multi-account and multi-authoring capabilities. This allows a social media team to be put in place to collectively manage updates and posts as well as take advantage of the notification and task assignment capabilities of the application. Streamlining the process of message dissemination and delivery is a positive step for any business whether small or not.. and this app has been built around that concept. In fact Twitter itself was built around the same concept and look how well it turned out.