I recently wrote about how I used Twitter to find travel insurance to illustrate how businesses can use twitter to find new clients.

But still people tell me that twitter doesn’t bring them any new clients. 

Well let me see if giving you another example of how one business used Twitter to promote their business to me will convince you.

I’m going to San Francisco later in the year and as prelude to that I started following @pier39 on Twitter (as an aside, their website http://www.pier39.com/ has a really cool webcam where you can watch the sea lions!)

I tweeted “ I’m following @pier39  because I’ll be visiting in August. Last time I was there was back in 1998 on my honeymoon!”

And a little while later I saw this in my mentions column in Hootsuite

AquariumOTheBay: @clarelauwerys hope you will come see us when you visit @pier39 !

I went and checked out their website - http://www.aquariumofthebay.com/ and yep it looks like something I’d like to visit.

So there you do – Aquarium of the Bay is using social media in a great way.

Note how friendly and soft their sell was. It wasn’t an aggressive  ”Hey hey hey! We’re brilliant, buy from us” – it was warm and casual, as if we had just met and were having a conversation in “real life”

And that’s how to do it. 

Convinced yet?