Twitter: indispensable marketing tool, or a big waste of time?

We’ve been pushing the benefits of social media marketing for small businesses for some time now – a flip through our recent blog posts will show that. Most mainstream media is pretty much in accord with us, but I guess that with every new fad there will be some naysayers. Up until now, those have been limited, in my experience, to the older generation of my family, or the odd ranting conversation at a party, but now the Huffington Post – a pretty mainstream internet news source – has published a piece questioning whether Twitter is just too much trouble for the small business.

I understand writer Nelson Davis’ point – that for the very small company, there just isn’t enough time in the day to keep up with the interaction that can take off on Twitter. He also quotes some doomy figures about the downturn of usage on the site. But for every negative he quotes, I could name a small local business that is getting palpable benefits from their tweets. There is also a small part of me who wonders whether this sort of piece is too easy to write: swim against the tide, and you’ll always get plenty of interest.