How Are Retailers Using Twitter?

No Turn On Red, a retail industry blog, recently announced a very interesting page of tweets from many large retailers at http://www.noturnonred.org/twitter/. Here you can see retailers making sales, supporting customers, or, as in the case of HomeDepotCanada, talking to themselves.

Most of the retailers have a lot of “at replies,” which are a Twitter name with a “@” in front. This indicates that the retailer is sending a message to a particular person, although the message is public. This is a sign of a conversation, and it is strong indicator of a Twitter user who “gets it.” When I checked the page, HomeDepotCanada was just authomatically tweeting advertisements, and not many people were following. So, the very conversational wholefoods has 14,600 followers and HomeDepotCanada has only 116.

In addition to being an interesting list, behemoth retailers that aren’t out of touch with modern technology, this page also demonstrates the importance of responding to tweets, not just broadcasting them.