TSR Entrepreneurs Society

For those of you who use twitter for business purposes, not personal accounts, when are the best time for tweets? Surely, some of you will have noticed that your links get more click-throughs at certain times of day.

Any thoughts?

How do you think one would use twitter for business purposes? Tweetings links to sales pages and so forth?

Depends on the business tbh.

For example, if you are running an online store: discounts, promotions, new products. Some companies use twitter as a way to get customer feedback / interact with clients much quicker, as opposed to a ticket / support system on their site. TSR uses twitter to promote threads in various forums. (They mentioned the Entrepreneurs Society a few days ago! )

I haven't really had the time to work on building my startups twitter account yet so I don't have first-hand experience on this.

One of my friends wrote an interesting article about limiting who you follow on twitter (http://enterprise.shef.ac.uk/2013/03/important-limit-follow-twitter#more-21849). I think this is quite useful for personal accounts but won't work as well for business ones. Commandant mentioned a few posts back about how he gained 10k followers after following 11.2k people.

What do you lot think of creating a directory? There isn't a very well publicized one in my area so I was thinking I could make one to cover my direct area. I could use twitter and facebook to tweet 'recommendations' and I could eventually list events on it too.

There would be a lot of ways to make revenue, but i'm not sure if people would use it? Obviously you've got the big boys (Yell etc) but they cater for the whole UK so don't have every local business in it.

It would appeal to the public and local businesses (to find local suppliers), but i'm not sure if directories are a thing of the past yet, or if there is still an opportunity to make something of it?

What do you think?

It's a case of getting people to use it, and ranking above the other directories in google.

Search for "plumber in (your) area" and see how many directories come up. If there are a few pages full of the 'big boys' I wouldn't bother

Depends how much time and effort you put into it. A full directory will not be easy to create, and will rely on a lot of user input. How many of those local businesses will bother inputing their details into the site? And you won't be getting a lot of regular users to the site, only one or two people who just so happened to be looking for a plumber / mover.

Concerning the bigger organisations, you can always market your system in such a way as to not compete with them, but rather, with the goal of having your directory being purchased by them. This is what eatstudent.co.uk did with JustEat.

Thanks. That's an interesting idea about eatstudent.co.uk.

I was thinking of making the directory and making it free for businesses to add their details, then once it gets some decent hits start charging businesses to renew the listing, or it gets removed. But as commandant says, if the first page of google is full of people like 'Yelp' then it will be difficult :/

Charging businesses won't be a good idea. Their businesses are already doing fine without the directory and unless you can find a way to prove that your site has generated an increase in profits in their individual businesses, most wouldn't both renewing the listing / paying for it. Also, if you begin to remove listings that aren't being paid for, your site will start losing information on all these local businesses that your original site was supposed to address.

Can anybody offer any advice on increasing traffic to an eBay shop? It's only been a few days and i'm still working on uploading items and making everything look good, but I have made one sale (I was so happy )

Traffic seems to be increasing daily, but any tips that might help it along would be great.

What do you sell?

Fishing tackle, bait and accessories. It's actually my Dad's business, he owns a shop and i'm putting it all online for him

Ah ok. It may be better to build a proper online shop, using Prestashop or something, just a thought.

I wouldn't advertise the online part in the physical shop because you don't want to drive customers away from the physical shop to the online shop. I'd treat them as different businesses under the same brand. Have a look for some Fishing websites, forums or blogs. Maybe if you send a discount code to a popular blog (which is exclusive to the blog) they may blog about it, which will drive traffic your way.

Post links on forums (but watch out for the rules!) as it's targeted traffic. Also do some offline marketing, like teaming up with local fishing lakes or fishing clubs to offer them good rates.

We have made a proper website as well, we need to start advertising that too. The ebay thing was just an extra idea that we thought could work well, and also help create awareness of the actual website as we can then advertise that to everybody that buys something.

I'd say that the business in the physical shop is reasonably safe as it's located at a fishing lake and a place where people go for short fishing breaks and stay in cabins, so most of the business comes from those people. We're hoping that going online with increase sales overall, create awareness of the shop and the lake, and also keep people buying through the months when people aren't fishing so much.

I was looking through some other ebay shops that are selling tackle and some of them are making a couple of hundred sales a day

That's a good idea about the blogs. I have looked around for blogs where I could mention the site without breaking the rules, but I hadn't thought of actually contacting them and offering them something.