Retailers: If You Tweet It, They Will Come.

If your customers are tweeting, it’s a good chance they’ll help boost your retail sales this holiday season. And that’s important, especially since the National Retail Federation expects sales growth for the 2012 holiday season to be slower than last year.
 

To survive, to make a profit, you’ll need to draw in a fragmented and increasingly tech-wise legion of customers to boost sales—from Black Friday (in some cases, Thursday) to year’s end. Not to worry says Twitter, for if you tweet it, they will come.
 

A recent study by Twitter and Compete Research followed 2,600 US Internet consumers who saw Tweets from 665 different retailers—including Walmart, Apple, Amazon, Pottery Barn and Groupon. The study looked at desktop browsers and screened out mobile  and tablets. The results revealed that Twitter users who were exposed to retailer Tweets visited those retailer websites more often than general internet users. Mainstream retail sites and specific apparel and accessories retailers both showed similar patterns. Niche retailers like toys or sporting goods enjoyed even more tweet-drawn visitors. Active Tweeters were also more prone to use their credit cards. And those exposed to Tweets were nearly 45% more likely to buy from an online retailer than non-tweeters.
 

The survey underscored the long-held believe that Twitter users shop heavily online and not just for major brands. If you’re a niche retailer, engaging your potential customers with tweets can pull in more customers than mass retailers. You can download the full Tweets In Action: Retail study.
 

So what’s the best way to use Twitter to engage your potential customers? The Social Media Examiner offered these suggestions:
 

Create a Twitter account for other people in your company. The reason: people are more likely to follow and engage with a live person than a business or logo. Equally important is to spend time finding and building your audience. To zero in on your customers, use Twitter’s Advanced Search to confine your tweets to a geographic area, then further refine by searching for specific terms. This will deliver all recent tweets that fit your demographic, as well as the handle and avatar of the person who tweeted. Using the results page, you’ll be able to follow these potential customers or click on their profile for more information. Once you start following these people, they’ll have a tendency to follow you, giving you a captive audience of followers.
 

Another tip is to provide incentives for your online audience to visit your store in person. Create Twitter-only discounts or coupons that customers can print and bring in. The coupons should be good for one day only to generate more visits to your page and create urgency—perfect for Black Friday “doorbusters.”
 

So get those tweets ready and have your staff tweet till their fingers turn blue. Black Friday is here. Recite the holy retail mantra to your staff: If you tweet it, they will come.
 

Photo courtesy of adamr / freedigitalphotos.net