Gain Valuable Feedback

Whether you’re starting a new company from scratch or releasing a new feature or product line, Twitter can serve as a great sounding board. Leveraged properly, the platform will enable you to you to learn from your customers and improve your product. Entrepreneurs who are active on Twitter can create a direct line from themselves to their customers; whether that’s to solicit feedback or provide customer support.

Teams that build continuous customer discovery into their DNA will become smarter than their investors, and build more successful companies.Steve Blank (@sgblank), entrepreneur, professor, author *

Getting feedback on what you want to build and release or how you can improve can yield useful feedback that informs your decisions. Following this feedback can yield better results than if you were to build and release something in isolation. You can opt to solicit feedback as a founder or employee, which has the benefit of personalization, or collect feedback under your company’s account, which may have the benefit of wider reach.

Half the advice I give to startups is some form of ‘talk to your customers.’Paul Graham (@paulg), author, essayist, co-founder, Y Combinator*

• Nat Friedman (@natfriedman), CEO of GitHub, has asked users on Twitter how GitHub profiles can be improved, yielding hundreds of responses.

• Ryan Hoover (@rrhoover), the Founder and CEO of Product Hunt, solicited suggestions from Product Hunt users on Twitter about potentially building an App Store.

• ColourPop Cosmetics (@colourpopco) asks users what new products they would like to see.

• Slack (@SlackHQ) has used Twitter to collect customer feedback, a strategy that helped propel them from a $0 to $1B company.

In general, learning from your users and gathering product sentiment is a key part of growing a business. Twitter is just one of many channels that will help you connect with your users and learn about the pain points they might be experiencing with your product.