Montreal Tech Watch

With hundreds of millions of tweets a day, we’ve got large number of consumers communicating about what they are looking for, on a level similar to Google search. This is what Needium is focusing on: finding all those consumers and forwarding them to local businesses.

Needium now has a full-time staff able to track those tweets, in different locations all over North America. A local business looking for customers can get Needium’s monthly plan and start attracting customers to their products, pretty much on a real-time basis. Without Needium, you’d need instead to have a full-time community manager or marketing person track all those tweets, a solution that most businesses can’t afford. Needium offers a fixed monthly price, at $150, although a variable pricing might be more relevant (a dentist lead is worth more than a coffee lead!)

Twitter is still new in consumer’s minds, and if replies are relevant and worded correctly, I am sure most consumers would welcome it. I am curious to see how this will evolve in the near future. If all businesses begin to get Needium-like services, users will begin to have dozens of replies to their comments about sandwiches or coffee, and those services will then be categorized as spam by users.

The Needium blog has more about their latest successes, if you want to keep up with a local & successful Twitter startup.