Twitter has long had the potential to be an excellent source of customer engagement and lead generation for a small businesses marketing efforts. Social media is but a tool in the marketing belt, not an end-all-be-all solution. Furthermore, it doesn’t always make sense for certain business verticals to be active on social media. Understanding your customers and where they are looking to engage with you online is business audit 101. Our friends over at Simply Business created a great Small Business Guide to Twitter. It is extremely thorough and is a step-by-step process of understanding and using Twitter for a small business.

Let’s check out three reasons why your small business should have a Twitter strategy:

Mobile users are more active on Twitter

In a Twitter-commissioned study by Compete back in February, it was determined that mobile users drive Twitter’s user engagement. Out of its 200 million active users, 60 percent use the service via mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, at least once a month. The study also revealed a few other interesting user behaviors, such as 57 percent of Twitter users access the service primarily via mobile devices and they are more likely to use the service several times a day compared to other Twitter users.

Takeaway: Twitter users are more engaged on their mobile devices, so testing mobile marketing strategies both location-based and demographic-based could prove measurable to bottom-line purchasing metrics.

Twitter updates show commitment to displaying and finding preferred media

Twitter continues to refine the UX for its users around displaying more relevant tweets and media. With the ability to contextualize marketing strategies through the use of hashtags and videos, small businesses can use Twitter as a immediate relevancy push-marketing tool for search. Customers can find relevant content through a myriad of ways about your products and services. The search function has been vastly improved, and now directs users to trending tweets, as opposed to all-time Top-Tweets.

Takeaway: This improvement, along with the new contextual tweet feature I mentioned will undoubtedly increase the user engagement level. The opportunity to improve affinity for your brand is immediate and on-going.

Twitter for small business is an “ask economy”

Mediabistro released a great infographic for stats, facts and tips for using Twitter for small business recently. A huge takeaway for me was this nugget: 663 percent – the increase of Twitter users asking for business recommendations in the last two years. Those are publicly searchable accounts asking for business recommendations in your industry.

Takeaway: You’re in essence leaving business on the table by not having a “listen” strategy for Twitter.