This blog post is a little bit special and is not actually written by us at Vibrant Pulse. Instead of banging on about how Facebook, Twitter, SEO etc can help you, we thought we would start to invite others, who benefit from them to write about it in the form of a guest blog. Today, we would like to introduce Moose Allain from ‘The World Of Moose’ to the spotlight as we asked him:

“How do you use Twitter and how has it helped your business?”

I started on twitter as an experiment, determined to let it grow without really promoting it. I didn’t really understand what it was, I don’t think you can understand it until you participate, particularly because everyone shapes their own twitter. I tried to be original and entertaining right from the start and occasionally posted my pictures. My follower numbers began increasing when one or two people with good followings began to recommend me. Before long people were asking me if they could buy the work I was putting on line. I have received a couple of commissions via Twitter and I have also sold work to followers who have come to various art fairs, etc. up and down the country which I have tweeted about. I sell consistently through my website. Although I haven’t looked at how much of this comes through twitter.

I think it’s very important to not be constantly selling. I give a lot of original material to my ‘audience’ and they don’t mind me plugging my work occasionally, as far as I can see. If they do, they don’t tell me, or they just unfollow! Your audience is self-regulating in that sense, which is definitely one of the things which makes twitter a powerful marketing tool. (I don’t want to slip into marketing speak because I’m not qualified and also because I think there is a very human, social aspect to twitter of which marketing is only a tiny part. In a sense we are all ‘marketing’ ourselves all the time, but that’s a pretty horrible way to describe the subtle complexity of human relationships!). Nevertheless, it’s a sort of meritocracy where you can be rewarded with more followers for good tweeting – as far as I can see this relationship works well for creative people with something that people want to buy.

There is a wonderful mutuality to twitter, you support the people you like by retweeting their ‘plugs’ and they do the same to you. Gradually you build a loyal following who you already know like your work and so are tolerant if not welcoming of occasional plugs. I think people follow me first and foremost because they enjoy the originality and variety of my tweets which are mainly verbal although I post my drawings as well. You get immediate feedback which is gratifying but also helpful. It has been an incredibly useful vehicle for trying out ideas and trialling products. For example we launched a range of mugs last year. I posted some of the early designs and got some great feedback, and also started to build some anticipation from people who wanted to buy them. When we finally went into production we sold out of our first batch pretty quickly just through twitter.

I think twitter has made a substantial difference to the way I work. Words, the enjoyment of language, have always been an important part of my work, both as an artist and in my previous career in architecture. As I draw I find words tumbling around in my head and twitter has been a fantastic vehicle for releasing/publishing these thoughts which would otherwise have fizzled off into nothing. Which is fine, because twitter is generally about amusing ephemera rather than profound epithets, but if you value what you write and archive it, as I do, you can transform it into something else. So for me it has increasingly become a creative medium as well as a social networking tool.

I know that my popularity is continuing to grow on twitter, but I think it’s because I have a genuine, individual and original voice. It is now starting to lead to all sorts of unforeseen opportunities and collaborations, which are changing the nature of how I describe what I do as an artist: film, performance, a lecture, illustration work, writing… it’s actually a bit overwhelming, but very exciting.

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Thank you Moose.

You can find Moose:

Twitter: @MooseAllain

Web: World Of Moose