How are enterprises using Twitter and/or other social media sites to draw in more customers?

Enterprises like Twitter and facebook draw in more customers by displaying advertisements to their audience on a more personal non-ad look basis.

Facebook uses fan pages, which allows people to identify themselves with that particular brand. When signed into your facebook account on the right hand side you see little boxes of things like sports teams, or ideas, or products that you and your friends can "like."

For example, when comparing if someone is an Adidas person or a Nike person. So by having a fan page on facebook, and stating you "like" it, the brand is able to pull in more customers because users are wanting to be branded as the type of person who wears that kind of shirt, sneaker, or whatever the brand is trying to sell. By having the fan sites, facebook also shows you what your friends are fans of. Therefore if showing you what the people you associate with associate themselves with, it might generate more attention to the product or brand in interesting you to "like" it or associate with it yourself.

Now sites like Twitter are a little bit different. Twitter lets the company interact with the individual so they fell more connected to what they're buying. It gives them a more personal connection to the customer, as they are able to advertise themselves to you directly by tweeting about their product or promotion.

For example a hotel may leave a comment about telling you to book a 2 night getaway for the low cost of x amount of dollars when you book it in the next two weeks. Therefore it gets you thinking about that vacation to your family or friend's house you've been trying to plan for the past month, and just haven't been able to think too much about the cost or when to do it.

Getting back to facebook for a minute...if you haven't noticed that besides the fan pages the advertisements you see when your logged into your own personal account...they are ads that are concerned with things that you state are in your hobbies and activities. This is a marketing technique that looks at your interests and complies directly with the brands you would potentially buy or have a general interest. This technique seems a little creepy because its going into your information, but its also very intelligent because it pinpoints your interests rather than showing you what your friends associate themselves with.

By using these more personal-like ads social media sites get a more emotional-like attachment to their potential customers, and are able to draw more people in.