Twitter – Possibly The Only Marketing Tool That Allows You To Promote Your Business From The Bath

I’ve run a lot of marketing courses for B&Bs and small businesses over the last few years and I can guarantee that the one question I am most likely to be asked is “How much time do you waste on the PC every day?” And it’s always that word “waste”. Not “how much time do you spend at your PC?” or “How much time do you sit at your PC?” but “How much time do you waste?” I must admit that the first time it happened to me, when I was speaking at the Sawday’s owners conference, my hackles raised just a little. My response then, and it has since become my standard response, was “How much time do you waste talking to guests?”, “How much time do you waste cleaning your B&B?”, “How much time to waste cooking breakfast?”

Of course this may well have been a foolish thing to say to 200+ Sawday’s B&B landladies, for whom the holy grail is customer service, so having got the worst of the rotten eggs and overripe tomatoes out of my freshly “highlighted for the event” hair, I continued to explain that marketing your business is just as important as all the other activities that you have to do to run a B&B. 99% of B&B owners would never question that 5 hours of cleaning ( and yes it does take me that long if I have 3 rooms to changeover ), several hours over breakfast, an hour chatting to guests is all essential time that you invest in your business. But suggest to some of those people that they spend an hour or so at the PC, they assume that you’re playing solitaire or trawling dodgy websites, certainly doing nothing of value.

The other strange thing that people seems to think is that providing a fabulous B&B and great customer service is somehow incompatible with spending time on marketing. I did not get to be a 5 star gold award B&B Sawday’s B&B, with a repeat guest rate for the coming year of 70%, by thinking that a great breakfast is a bowl of Shreddies & UHT orange juice, or that running a feather duster round in 10 minutes is an adequate room clean. You can run a fabulous B&B and still spend time on the computer – it’s true.

There is no point creating the best B&B in the world, but then doing nothing to market it. These days you don’t need to spend thousands on marketing. Yes, getting a fabulous, professional looking website which is optimised for the search engines is an essential and it won’t come cheap. But from there on it there are so many ways to market your business that cost nothing but your own time; blogging, newsletters, Facebook, Twitter etc.

For me I try and allocate the following time to marketing activities.

1. Putting a blog post on my B&B website – 20-30mins once a week
2. Updating my B&B Facebook Page – 10 minutes once a day ( also giving me the opportunity to check up on my teenage daughter at university )
3. Newsletter – 3 hours once every couple of months

That actually averages out to about 8 hours a month or 15 minutes a day – not bad compared with 300 minutes of cleaning a day.

Of course the one thing that has the potential to be a time waster is Twitter. And you can get allow yourself to get drawn into it and spend a lot of time tweeting merrily away. However, if you can be disciplined with yourself, you can get away with doing it effectively & efficiently. The beautiful thing about Twitter is that it is so quick to do, and if you get yourself a smartphone you can tweet anywhere ( out on a dog walk, in a supermarket checkout queue, as passenger in a car or on a train )

Let’s say you decided to send 10 tweets a day ( ignoring replies & direct messages for now ):

• A photo of the view on a beautiful morning from your B&B taken from your Blackberry whilst you wait for guests to come down for breakfast ( 1 tweet ) – 30 seconds
• A description of the breakfast you have cooked that morning whilst guests guests are eating breakfast ( 2 tweets ) – 40 seconds
• A link with short description to an event that happening in your area that you find through Google Alert whilst you’re waiting for guests to check out ( 1 tweet ) – 20 seconds
• A retweet of someone else about local restaurants keeping their Michelin stars whilst you’re in the supermarket checkout queue( 1 tweet ) – 10 seconds
• Telling your followers about an event you’ll be staging at the local market from your Blackberry whilst you’re stirring marmalade ( 2 tweets ) – 40 seconds
• A link to your favourite online marmalade recipe whilst you’re waiting for the jars to cool ( 1 tweet ) – 20 seconds
• A tweet about some funny things that happened to you during the days from your Blackberry whilst you’re soaking in the bath ( 1 tweets ) – 20 seconds
• A photo of the bunch of snowdrops you found whilst out walking the dogs taken from your Blackberry ( 1 tweet ) – 30 seconds

There – that was easy wasn’t it and a grand total of 3.5 minutes?

Of course you’re going to need to spend a bit more time that that and what will take up more time is replying to people who talk to you or searching out topics that are interesting. But being organised, maybe allocated a few minutes every few hours throughout the day and using a tool to organise your favourite Twitter friends, such as Tweetdeck, will save you lots of time.

So get yourself a smart phone ( even my 74 year old technophobe artist father is now happily whizzing round his iPad & HTC phone – so no excuses ) with a waterproof cover, jump in that bubbly bath and start promoting your business now.