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My article is called, “Marketing Small Businesses with Twitter” by Claire Cain Miller. In this article they talk about how more and more small businesses are using twitter to market their company to people they have never connected with before. A small business owner in San Francisco opened up a crème brulee cart that he roamed around the streets with. He found out one of the people in line had heard about it through twitter and that sparked the idea. The owner, Curtis Kimball set up an account on twitter to start marketing his product. He has over 5,000 followers who wait and see where he will be next just so they know where to get one of his desserts.

More and more people are joining Twitter each day. It is a quick way where you can get information from what your friends are doing, news updates, celebrity tweets, etc. As a small up and coming business usually you do not have a lot of money to go out and market your product like you would want to. Especially if you are in a small town, it is hard for people outside of that town to hear about you. Twitter is free and easy to use. As a restaurant you could tweet a special you are having that night or at a store you could tweet a sale. A lot of stores send out emails but most people do not want to read them because of how many emails they get a day so they just send it to junk mail. If you log onto twitter you are interested in what you are looking at and are interested in what that company has to tweet because you make the choice on twitter on who you want to follow. All it takes for a small company to get a whole bunch of new people in to their store is a couple of retweets from their followers. For example if five of their followers retweet and those followers have an average of 100 followers then that company just got 500 different people to see what they just tweeted. This gives each company and opportunity to expand and grow very rapidly.

With these options of all the positive publicity also leads to the options of negative publicity. You could have a few people who had a very bad experience at your store or restaurant and go tweet about it but this is a risk worth taking. Your possible good greatly exceeds the bad.

The part that excites many small businesses is that it can make them go from being just a town business to a nationwide known business. You could quickly get people ordering products from across the country without you even trying to contact someone from that area. It would also be very helpful to a consumer who is looking for a product in their area but can’t find it and can now hear about it on twitter. The more people that join twitter, the bigger the options are for small businesses.

Miller, Claire Cain. "Marketing Small Businesses With Twitter - NYTimes.com." The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia. 21 Sept. 2011. Web. 21 Sept. 2011. .