How Retailers Could Profit from Twitter

I'm fairly new to Twitter. I think I've used it for about a month and a half. And really had no clue what it was up until then. I don't consider myself to be an average user of anything, as my mind is always thinking of ways something works or how it can be improved.

Such is the case with Twitter. I have read tweets about retailers and fortune 100 companies getting on Twitter and how big biz is having problem using Twitter to advertise successfully.

I have an idea...

Most sites (Amazon, Walmart, Dell, Zappos, etc.) require that online customers have an account at their site. This makes for and excellent marketing opportunity. Amazon does an amazing job at tracking user preferences and interests to target the marketing for an individual. It is also known that now-a-days (in the Web2.0) era, consumers are interested in what other people are buying and recommending.

Here's my suggestion to online retailers (and if you aren't online, get online and do this):
Make app that will tweet "I just purchased WHATEVER from RETAILER for PRICE. Get yours at URL-TO-PRODUCT" upon a purchase.

This shouldn't be that hard to do. In fact, half the work may already be done! With TwitterFeed, all retailers would have to do is set up an RSS feed for each user. The user would have the option to add this RSS feed to their TwitterFeed.

I am an Amazon affiliate... I would only hope that Amazon would allow consumer recommendations to be tweeted in such a way that the affiliate would receive $. In other words, someone goes to a site that features books. Affiliate gets commission from purchase and Amazon tweets advertisement. Affiliate would also get, at least a partial commission, from purchases that occur by someone following the link on the tweet.

After a few days of having received the product, an option would be extended to the consumer to grade the product. This would generate ANOTHER tweet similar to the previous one but it would contain the grade.

Twitter

It's been a few days shy of a month since the first "Tweet" was posted on http://twitter.com/glycotrainer. It took a few days to figure it out, but has been an awesome communication tool since!
The very first person I followed was Tony Robbins (@tonyrobbins). His name showed up in the "Trendy Topics" list. The guy is full of positive energy! It's awesome to read his posts. Once I got the hang of it, I began to look for profiles that posted relative content to ours (health, wellness, finances, motivational, industry news, etc). At the moment, these are my favorites:

• @tonyrobbins - As eluted to earlier, Tony Robbins is the definition of positive. His posts will make your day. His sincerity comes through to you via every single one of his posts. Thank you, Tony!
• @glicoentrenador - GlycoTrainer (us) in Spanish.
• @quotegarden - Health and Motivational quotes.
• @clarkhowardshow - Clark Howard is amazing at finding great offers & at money management. He's money savvy and you are guaranteed to learn how to spend less, save/invest more, legal matters, how to improve your credit score, and a lot more.
• @HealthyMinute - Lots of health information. Pete posts about weight loss and management, proper nutrition, and all types of related information. Tweets very frequently.
• @Prebiotics - This company posts non-stop information and articles about prebiotics and probiotics. A lot of the information they post mentions health benefits of pre- and probiotics.
• @mberg - Ex-coworker, buddy of mine. Matt is part of GeekCorps. He doesn't post as often as he should. When he does, it's about the aide he and his peers offer third-world (Matt happens to be in Africa) countries.
• @WhatsGabyCookin - Delicious food recipes. Gaby is ex tennis player who still works out. So you KNOW this food has to be healthy (for the most part).
• @MannaRelief - Non-profit organization that gives free glyconutrients (and other children's supplements) to orphans worldwide (mostly in third world nations.
• @iamdiddy - Sean Diddy Combs... Tweets motivational messages very often. It's an aw@esome chance to get into a multi-millionaire's head.
• @DaveDube - Inspirational, networking tips. Dave Dube posts a lot of Zig Ziglar quotes.
• @YouQuotedQuoes - Inspirational and motivational quotes.
• @DanTanner - Market information. Dan Tanner posts profit declarations by companies, stock updates, market updates, and other investment related information.
• @PJA64X - Inspirational and motivational quotes.
• @Alyssa_Milano - Enough said.

So, as mentioned, GlycoTrainer has two accounts with Twitter. @glycotrainer for English tweets and @glicoentrenador for Spanish tweets. It was getting a little hectic to keep track of tweets and their translations. I looked into installing TweetDeck a couple of weeks ago but had been unable to do so until this morning. It is awesome!

Keeping track of both accounts is extremely easy! Here's how it works:

• On one column, you are shown you tweets from those you are following. Exact content as is found on "Home" within your Twitter account.
• On another column, you are shown posts that mention you. Exact content as is on "Updates Mentioning [you]" within your Twitter account.
• On another column, you are shown suggestions of people you may want to follow. This seems to not work as well as it should. So far, most of the suggestions I've gotten have been of not interest to me whatsoever.

Of course the columns described above can be removed and added at a later date. They can also be shifted from side to side. The idea here is that the interface is configurable. This is a must-have twitter application.

I have been manually tweeting new site and blog posts. As you can imagine, it can become a hassle to have to log into the blog, write it, go to twitter, get URL from tinyurl.com or something similar, think of clever 140 character (including short URL) statement about blog. And then have to do the same for Spanish. No no... To help with this, I am now (as of today) using TwitterFeed. This application, as TweetDeck, is a must have!
So what this application does is read a feed and post its title and a description. The awesome part of this application is that it automatically shortens the URL and from it, finds the exact number of characters that it will display as a tweet. You can choose to tweet the title only or the title and the articles description. This is going to work out just fine for us at GlycoTrainer because our entire site is powered by WordPress. WordPress provides an RSS Feed that TwitterFreed integrates with easily.