While most people think of Twitter as a marketing tool, which it is, it can also be used to replace or augment other business activities.  Businesses can even save costs by using Twitter for some of their activities.  In this post, we are exploring some of the business areas where Twitter can help you bring down costs.  These will be especially useful for small businesses which don’t have a lot of money at disposal.

1. Order taking – Twitter can be easily extended by businesses as an order desk.  Create an ID especially for booking orders for your products and services.  Use any of the desktop Twitter tools or, even better, use one of the available mobile applications to track orders.  No need to employ someone to manage your order desk 24/7.

Who is doing this: The Coffee Groundz that started booking orders on Twitter in 2008.

2. Polls and Surveys – Use Twitter for getting people’s opinion on your business and activities by letting them poll or participate in surveys.  You can use PollDaddy’s twitter polls which is a free service or twtpoll which is a paid service but provides advanced options.

Who is doing this: CNET, CNN, Yahoo, United Airlines to name a few.

3. Emotional Intelligence – Twitter users often share their experience, feedback and opinions about products and service they use.  Businesses can now track what is being shared about them on Twitter without spending a fortune.  There are free tools like TwitScoop and TweetBeep for tracking tweets that mention your brand.

Here is the result when I searched for Dell.

An extreme form of emotion expressed on Twitter is Unfollowing someone.  If you are already using Twitter for your business and want to know which of your messages made you lose existing followers, you can use TweetEffect that tracks the change in the number of your followers with every Tweet.  Good tool to measure the impact of your tweets.

Who is doing this: Actually anyone can do this and you can gather emotional intelligence not just about yourself but others also.  For example, using TweetEffect, I tracked the changes in President Obama’s followership and found some interesting relationships between the Tweets and followership that you can see in the images above.

4. Customer Service – Another area where Twitter can be very useful.  Provide a Twitter address where customers can send you a direct message whenever they need help with your products and services.  Track and respond to customer queries and support requests through any of the free Twitter management tools.

Who is doing this: I know of Comcast and JetBlue.  Please let us know through comments if you know anyone else.

5. Competition Analysis – Want to know what your competition is doing, what is the buzz about your competitor on the Internet, what are some of the areas that have your competitor’s customers unhappy and so on.  You can track all these things through Twitter.

Use TwitterStats and TweetVolume to find out how many times people mention your brand and your competitor’s.  These two only provide quantitative analysis.  If you are looking for qualitative comparison, you will need to make use TwitScoop and TweetBeep.

Who is doing this: Anyone, just that nobody wants to do it publicly and that’s why I don’t know of any name.

6. News, Announcements and PR – No need to hire an expensive PR agency to announce and distribute your company’s news.  Use Twitter to distribute news and make announcements.  Send a message to @MicroPR and it will be distributed to all the media professionals and bloggers who follow them.  You can also use #Twitpitch hash tag to pitch your company, product or service.

Who is doing this: Google uses Twitter to share the news stories and important announcements related to all its products and services.  Dell also shares announcements @Direct2Dell.

7. Raising capital and donations – This is something that most non-profits can make use.  I am not too sure of the legal issues involved in companies pitching for private investments through Twitter but know of at least one example of such request.  Jason Goldberg, the founder of Social Median, that was recently acquired by Xing, posted a message on Twitter soliciting angel investment.

8. Hiring Talent – If you are looking for talented people to join your business, chances are you will find them on Twitter.  Just post your requirement as a tweet and you may end up getting references from your followers or direct messages from interested parties.

Who is doing this: Sodexo USA, a company involved in food service and facilities management has a dedicated Twitter account named Sodexo Careers.

9. Special Offers, Discounts and Coupons – Use Twitter to notify people of discounts that you are offering without advertising costs.  If you wish to provide coupons to your customers, use twtQpon to create and distribute discount coupons.

Who is doing this: Dell Outlet offers deals and discounts through Twitter.

10. Manage company events – Want to invite people to your company’s event or a webinar.  Use Twitter to promote your event.  In case you want to be more organized, use CalTweet or VeVite.  These tools allow you to set up an event on Twitter, invite guests and have RSVP responses mailed to you.

Know of any other areas where businesses can save money using Twitter for managing their activities, please care to share.