Sage Blog

If you’re reading this blog then you may be a regular visitor to the Sage Blog, or more likely you’ll have been directed here by a tweet.

My inspiration to write this blog came from reading an article in the BA Business Life magazine whilst I was flying last week. I read the statistic that 27% of UK SME’s use twitter. Doing a quick piece of math, 27% of 1.4 million businesses registered for VAT equals 460,000 SME businesses using twitter in the UK today…  and this number would rise to well over 1 million if you include businesses who are not VAT registered.

There is a readymade network out here that the SME can leverage, not only to share information about their business, but to set up trading network and build their brand. What’s more the buzz word in industry today is globalisation, more and more businesses are trading overseas and twitter plays to this as you’ll see in the example below, as it has no boundaries.

As a social networking tool Twitter has had a bit of a meteoric rise to fame with between 3 and 6 million users from all walks of life, with some very notable participants in the likes of Bill Gates and Barak Obama, although I’m not sure the latter writes his own tweets.

I have to admit when I tried it first time round, I was unimpressed… how can it possibly be of any use? How do I know who to follow? How do I get followers? What could I talk about? and how could I say it in only 140 characters?

Today, I’m a convert, I use twitter every day, it’s an excellent source of news and information on just about any topic. For me it allows me to keep my finger on the pulse of IT and Business information as well as to share information about Sage as well as my other passions with people who have chosen to follow me.

When I say share information with people who have chosen to follow me, the twitter network leverages the six degrees of separation principle well, so if one of my follower’s re-tweet’s my tweet, then all of their followers get to see my tweet, and so on.

To give you an example of how this works, I tweeted a link to my last blog on the secret to successful innovation then I watched what happened… even though I only have a few hundred followers myself, within the first hour, my original tweet had an audience of over 30,000 people. Within a couple of days my blog had gone around the world and turned up on other sites such as Innovation America,  it also stimulated others to reuse parts of my blog in their own innovation blog a way to keep the message alive and a complement indeed.

I was amazed by what had happened here… one piece of information, seen by a huge audience across the globe and recycled a second and third time, what’s more it increased network traffic on sage.co.uk and on average people looked at 8 pages in addition to the one they were directed to… and all from a single tweet… the power of social networking truly is amazing.

I would strongly encourage all of the SME’s reading this to think about how you might use the power of social/business networking to benefit your business. Twitter is just one part of what you need, it’s a tool to build your network, headline key information and lead people to your business. When they get there they need to find a website, or a blog with more meaningful and relevant information.

I don’t propose to tell you how to get going with twitter in this blog as it has been covered by many  people already… although you might find this link useful from CIO online and this link from Social SmallBiz who offer great advice to SME’s or our own guide to social media for small businesses.

Give it a try, other than a little of your time and effort, it’s free… and you might be as amazed with the results as I was.

Follow me on Twitter http://twitter.com/_stuartlynn

Written by Stuart Lynn, Head of R&D, Sage Mid Market Division