There are multiple ways you can use social media to improve your sales and quality of service to your customers. Twitter is a great way to send quick, useful information to customers. In CourseSales.com you can:

• automatically follow customers who supply you with their twitter account. You do this by setting up a field on the registration form requesting the user’s twitter account and then sending a request via an email to your country’s shortcode number

• post updates to a course status; completed/started/exam completed. By triggering an email to your country’s shortcode number

• send a private twitter message to a participant to remind them of a course

• welcome people on the course automatically when they confirm attendance

• update your company’s twitter account bio for everyone to see eg. Just starting our latest Microsoft Word course!

How to do this

1. To communicate with a student you need their twitter account name without the @ sign at the beginning (you use the @ when writing messages to them)

2. Construct the sms message in the subject of an email template (depending on your email to sms provider) as you might an email in Publish > Content, restricting to 160 characters (due to the limit of sms messages)

3. Once the message template is created check the field ‘Email to SMS address’ under Setup > Organisation from your email to sms provider, and the login, created in Setup > Logins for sms messages is set up using the ‘twitter’ role, created in Publish > Options > Roles. The email address for the twitter login should use your ‘Email to SMS address’ details. Copy and paste it to create the email address using your country’s provider shortcodes - see below, eg. 0198089488@sms.utbox.net

4. Create a process rule to send the email, ensuring that the To address is the twitter role.

5. Ensure that the twitter login is associated to your course masters so that it can then be used when sending the messages.

Notes

• We recommend you use an email to SMS gateway

• You need to activate and link your phone with your twitter account

• Be sure to use an email to sms gateway the allows you to specify the sender mobile number, so your messages are seen to come from the mobile phone registered with your twitter account

• Use the following links to help you:

  • Tweeting via text message

  • Twitter's supported mobile carriers - includes each country’s shortcodes (to send messages to)

  • Twitter SMS commands
  • What Twitter usernames are allowed
  • Include variables in emails and PDFs

Caveats

You need to ensure that gathering twitter account details is done using the Twitter username format validation (on TEXT field type) to ensure the security of the sms messages you send - not doing so might lead to messages being sent that include other commands which could compromise your twitter account.