One of my favorite Miva Merchant developers, Bill Weiland of Emporium Plus recently had a Twitter epiphany and discovered many of the great things that we have found Twitter to be useful for. With his permission, I would like to share his recent comments with you.

Emporium Plus is on Twitter
I’ll be the first to admit, I’ve been slow about getting on the social networking bandwagon. It is true, it is hard to teach an old dog new tricks. Nobody will argue with you if you think I’m pretty old and it has been hard to get me to see the light on this.

Last week the light came on with this post from SpeakerRepair.com Thanks Eric. It seemed like an easy task, given that the modules needed to do it could do most of what Eric was looking for. The great thing is he already had the modules, they just needed minor tweaking.

But alas, to do that tweaking I need to sign up for Twitter. Cringe… Next I needed to follow somebody to see what happens. Logically that somebody was http://twitter.com/Miva_Merchant Hmmm. Very cool.

So I did the minor tweaks to the Coupon Redemption and Tool Kit modules. Then added a couple more cron tasks to my test store. Then tested. Voila! Deal of the Day automatically ran, posted to my Twitter and mirrored on my Facebook. Wow, was that awesome.

So next I did the obvious; I sent tweets that I had updated the Tool Kit and Coupon modules. A few minutes later, I saw that Rick at miva_merchant had re-tweeted my tweets and sent them to a few hundred of his followers. The result was that I immediately got people asking for the free updates. Now that is really awesome. Thanks Rick.

Clearly this system works. It has significant marketing opportunities for an online store. Note that they have guidelines about spamming. So you’ll have to keep your usage within those guidelines.

So how do I plan to use Twitter?

1) Bug fixes and module conflicts. When folks order through Emporium Plus I can easily generate an email list and send them all the updated module. I can’t easily do that with the authorized re-sellers like MivaCentral and Design Extend. So this will help get the word out that an update is needed.

2) Significant new features. When I make big changes I have, in the past, announced those changes in this forum. There is no telling how many read the posts in this “announcements” forum. It is more of a passive notification.

3) Minor tweaks. I frequently make minor tweaks to modules based on requests from users. In their eyes, it is something they feel lots of people would want. In reality it is probably something only they and a couple others would want. So I don’t mention the new features anywhere except in the install/usage docs.

4) Tips and tricks. Every once in awhile I write up a “how to” doc, mainly for the tool kit. Unless you are looking at every entry in the tool kit product page at Emporium Plus, you would never see that newly created “how to” page.

5) I often run XX% off sales. But unless you happen to visit my store and see the note at the top of the page, you probably never knew it happened.

Sorry, this has been so long winded, but I hope it has given you some ideas for your own store’s marketing campaigns along with letting you know that Emporium Plus is now on Twitter. If you have any of our modules, you might want to follow us.

You can follow us for module update info, tips, tricks, and sales by going to http://twitter.com/emporiumplus

Bill is using Twitter to not only keep the Miva Merchant community updated on module updates, but to also offer variety of other very valuable information.

Bill Weiland was also featured in my Faces of Miva Merchant post