A solid customer service program may be one of the best marketing investments you can make as a small business owner. Your receptionist is often the first human contact a potential customer has with your company, and you client services team maintains regular contact with your key accounts. These people can make or break major deals for your company, so are you leveraging all the tools available for managing client relationships?

Major companies, including Best Buy, Comcast, and Wells Fargo are using Twitter to address client concerns and rectify customer service issues. For a first-hand account of how this works, check out this article on ATT&T’s use of Twitter for customer service.

While your small business may not have the millions of users these global corporations have, you can still use Twitter to maintain contact with your customers in real time. Twitter is totally scalable, so if only a few hundred of your customers use Twitter, you and your staff can focus on these users. Follow your users; watch their tweets; discover what they’re saying about your brand.