Dell who is now apparently out of “Dell Hell” and into being a bit more progressive than it’s rivals says they generated $3M in sales since 2007 because of  Twitter and $1M of that was in the last six months. Dell Outlet (Twitter name) has well over 600,000 followers meaning ”people who have chosen to follow Dell Outlet”. When Dell Outlet tweets about a special it drives traffic to their website and authorized store outlets.

Let’s take a look at some meaningful math. Let’s say the average laptop sale is $650, that means 1539 tweeters pulled out their twallets (I’ll have to enter that one into the Twitter dictionary) to generate $1M in sales. This response rate is very low at .002%, but it doesn’t matter because the only cost factor for Dell is employee time. Compared to direct marketing vehicles such as email and snail mail that is very low, the response rates here vary widely depending upon best practices adherence and falls between less than 1% and 5% with the average being around 1.5% depending on the campaign (these days anything over 1.5% is considered good).

So what does this all mean if you are a small business? It means you need an integrated business and marketing plan to help guide your budget and time investments for the best return. As in the Dell example above, tweeting by itself doesn’t create sales, it’s the integration of tweeting to drive behavior to other touch points of influence and call to action that impact sales.