The Twitter Train of Social Ecommerce

All aboard! If you aren’t twittering yet, you’d better start thinking about how to integrate Twitter into your business soon. I think this one is here to stay. Dell has already proven that Twitter works for them, after producing over $1M on sale alerts and now offering exclusive deals to their 11,000+ followers.

Sure, Dell is a big name brand… but Twitter is a level playing field. Just as people sign up for your email newsletters today, they can start following you on Twitter too. But here’s the big difference — consumers like to stay in control. As soon as they turn over their email address, they lose that control. With Twitter, consumers stay in total control with the "follow" button, and they can choose to dump you (ok, "not follow") anytime they want.

Here is an example from Yahoo! merchant WineGlobe.com, an online wine retailer:

And it gets better. The open nature of the Twitter platform allows others to build cool applications, opening the door for you to create Twitter Coupons to begin your social media marketing campaigns, right now. The best part? The cost is your time, for now at least.

We would love to hear your thoughts and experiences with Twitter as a social ecommerce channel, so please share your comments with the Yahoo! merchant community.

Special thanks to @shawnafennell and @ecommerce for calling out these cool new tools, re-tweets and all. If you couldn’t tell already, this got me excited!

Tweet you later.

Michael Ober
Yahoo! Small Business
Follow me on Twitter