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This is a guest post by Alvina Lopez:

Twitter and Small-Business: 3 Brief Stories to Inspire Other Small-Business Owners

We often hear Twitter stories about customers and large corporations and how the two interact both online and in real life, but what of all the small businesses? How have they adapted Twitter’s usefulness into their business models?

If a quick Google search is any indication, most of them have done exceedingly well. There are many success stories around the internet that tell of small businesses’ ability to connect with clients and potential customers in order to promote their brand in many ways, ranging from basic status alerts of hours and location changes to extravagant sales and contests.

Here are just a few scenarios that other small business owners can learn from:

@powells – Powell’s Books (Portland, OR)

Powell’s books is a well-known independent books store that recently celebrated it sixteenth year of having an online presence and store (its brick and mortar location is forty years old). As part of this sixteenth birthday celebration, the store recently offered over $500 worth of free books to contest entrants, all of whom had heard of the prizes online. This celebration, no doubt, also brought many new customers to the Powell’s Books website, and hopefully their experience was good enough to keep them coming back.

@desserttruck – DessertTruck Works (New York, NY)

DessertTruck Works is one of the many street food vendors that travel around our cities to sell their food to hungry urban workers. Many of the street food vendors use Twitter to tell their customers where to find them, what deal sand meals they’ve got for the day, and how their trucks will handle inclement weather, traffic problems, and other sudden changes in the route. By keeping customers informed, DessertTruck Works and vendors like it can better protect their expected sales figures, thus keeping profits up.

@danielha – cofounder of Disqus, a third party blog commenting platform

Shortly after a blogger Tweeted that she did not think she could use Disqus because it would not handle the older comments on her blog, essentially erasing them from the blog after the switch, cofounder of Disqus Daniel Ha responded to her with a question: “doh. how can we make it easier for you?’ What followed was a back and forth through email which ultimately led to Disqus finding a way to handle old comments. By watching his brand and interacting with users, Ha managed to help one blogger out and greatly expand Disqus through this improvement.

As I said earlier, these are just a few of the many small business Twitter success stories that you can read about online. The important thing to keep in mind is that in each of these stories, and in others around the internet, we see small businesses using Twitter to focus on connecting with clients and potential customers. They’re not simply in the game to get the most followers, but rather they seem interested in developing relationships within the community. They understand that using Twitter to gain others’ trust is the first step to growing their business.

By-line:

This guest post is contributed by Alvina Lopez, who writes on the topics of accredited online schools.  She welcomes your comments at her email Id: alvina.lopez @ gmail.com.