Whilst most of the social media world is theorising about “social media strategy”, it can pay to follow those who lead by example. Here are three links to three companies who are using Twitter to sell product to a defined community of customer/followers:

1. Dell Outlet - see one of their twitter pages here - Dell have Stephanie@Dell offering customer support on their page
   
2. Misco  - see their twitter page here - Misco have added a deal of the day to their background.
   
3. Viking Direct - see their twitter page here

I think these are great uses of Twitter. Each company can add or remove offers by the second. On the basis that “birds of a feather flock together” it’s highly likely that these offers will be re-tweeted to friends of colleagues of each first generation follower.  Links can be tracked,  sales can be measured, sales ROI can be calculated. On that topic if you go to the Dell Outlet page you can see that it has 1.5m followers which makes it the 89th most popular page globally (twitterholic). That gives Dell more followers than Paris Hilton, Stephen Fry or Sarah Brown.

To cut a long story short the Dell Outlet page offers these things: Utility, Relevance, Value.  If you can’t score more than 7/10 on each of these three measures, and you’re not a celebrity, then you will struggle to make twitter work for your business.