Five tips for local businesses looking to use Twitter

TRACK EVERY SALE. Sure, Twitter’s relatively cheap, but you still want to know you’re getting something for the human effort. XYZ’s point-of-sale system codes the origin of every order — was it from a specific coupon or a box topper? — which allowed it to calculate that a recent “Tweetie Bird Special” (Twitter promotion) accounted for 15% of their revenue on the day it ran.

TWITTER IS NOT FACEBOOK. Twitter is more immediate — if a person doesn’t check their Twitter feed for an hour they could easily miss the message. Berry Chill CEO Michael Farah uses Twitter for real-time communication (”Spotted: Justin Timberlake at Berry Chill!”) and Facebook for longer-lead calls to action, like enlisting focus-group volunteers.

CREATE A CONVERSATION. Don’t blast promotions incessantly. Intersperse them with other nuggets of wisdom or news related to your products and industry or neighborhood. Or, if you have a broader social mission, use Twitter to communicate that. Naked Pizza co-founder Jeff Leach suggests that if these kinds of social technologies become game changers, there may be a day when companies’ initial business plans take into consideration whether they have anything worth microblogging.

SELL LAST-MINUTE INVENTORY. Twitter’s immediacy is its biggest strength — so use it to pump up business during lulls or discount last-minute unsold goods, said Zack Steven, co-founder of LocalTweeps, a local Twitter directory, who caught same-day discounted tickets at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis via Twitter.

ALERT FOLLOWERS WHEN YOU’RE ON THE GO. Venture capitalist Fred Wilson likes to point to KogiBBQ, a Korean taco truck that drives around Los Angeles, alerting its almost 20,000 followers to its current and future locations via a Twitter feed.