Dragons Den star gives firms a boost on Twitter - Community

Sponsored by

Dragons Den star gives firms a boost on Twitter

Published on 03/02/2013 06:56

A family firm of tree surgeons from Marlpool has received a business boost from TV Dragons’Den star Theo Paphitis.

Last week, Drew Patterson, owner of Tree Hugger and Son, tweeted Theo about his business during ‘Small Business Sunday’#SBS, an initiative that is run weekly.

The Dragon retweeted Drew’s message to his 310,000 followers and as a result, the business has gained more than 75 new followers in less than 24 hours.

Drew, 48, said: “We have been trying for the #SBS retweet for over six months and can’t quite believe that we’ve now managed it. I was in the middle of a networking meeting when the tweet was spotted and for once was lost for words. Theo is a well-known entrepreneur - he’s inspiring.”

The firm was founded by Drew eight years ago after he retired as a postmaster following 23 years’ service. It includes his son Ross, 23, a qualified tree surgeon as well, and Joshua Weedon, 21, a qualified groundsman. Tree Hugger and Son are NPTC qualified arborists and offer a complete service from planting, to pruning, to dismantling and removing dangerous trees and have a 24-hour call out service.

Drew said he took up Twitter six months ago with the help of Belper-based company Social Myna, which won a re-tweet from Theo Paphitis last year, and is now an enthusiastic advocate. He said: “Social media has helped us massively during this recession, It makes people realise we are a friendly bunch and allows them to check out our website and testimonials from customers. It also makes people aware we are part of the Derbyshire Trusted Traders Scheme, which is run by Derbyshire Trading Standards.”

Community

Looking for...

Featured advertisers

Jobs

Search for a job

Motors

Search for a car

Make Model Price from Price to

Property

Search for a house

Buy Rent

Bedrooms Price from Price from Price to Price to

What is a Cookie?
What is a Flash Cookie?
Can I opt out of receiving Cookies?
About our Cookies

Cookies are small data files which are sent to your browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome etc) from a website you visit. They are stored on your electronic device.
This is a type of cookie which is collected by Adobe Flash media player (it is also called a Local Shared Object) - a piece of software you may already have on your electronic device to help you watch online videos and listen to podcasts.
Yes there are a number of options available, you can set your browser either to reject all cookies, to allow only "trusted" sites to set them, or to only accept them from the site you are currently on.

However, please note - if you block/delete all cookies, some features of our websites, such as remembering your login details, or the site branding for your local newspaper may not function as a result.
The types of cookies we, our ad network and technology partners use are listed below:
- Revenue Science ►
  
  A tool used by some of our advertisers to target adverts to you based on pages you have visited in the past. To opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Google Ads ►
  
  Our sites contain advertising from Google; these use cookies to ensure you get adverts relevant to you. You can tailor the type of ads you receive by visiting here or to opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Webtrends / Google Analytics ►
  
  This is used to help us identify unique visitors to our websites. This data is anonymous and we cannot use this to uniquely identify individuals and their usage of the sites.
- Dart for Publishers ►
  
  This comes from our ad serving technology and is used to track how many times you have seen a particular ad on our sites, so that you don't just see one advert but an even spread. This information is not used by us for any other type of audience recording or monitoring.
- ComScore ►
  
  ComScore monitor and externally verify our site traffic data for use within the advertising industry. Any data collected is anonymous statistical data and cannot be traced back to an individual.
- Local Targeting ►
  
  Our Classified websites (Photos, Motors, Jobs and Property Today) use cookies to ensure you get the correct local newspaper branding and content when you visit them. These cookies store no personally identifiable information.
- Grapeshot ►
  
  We use Grapeshot as a contextual targeting technology, allowing us to create custom groups of stories outside out of our usual site navigation. Grapeshot stores the categories of story you have been exposed to. Their privacy policy and opt out option can be accessed here.
- Subscriptions Online ►
  
  Our partner for Newspaper subscriptions online stores data from the forms you complete in these to increase the usability of the site and enhance user experience.
- Add This ►
  
  Add This provides the social networking widget found in many of our pages. This widget gives you the tools to bookmark our websites, blog, share, tweet and email our content to a friend.
- 3rd Party Cookies ►
  
  We use Advertising agencies to provide us with some of the advertising on our websites. These include (but are not limited to) Specific Media, The Rubicon Project, AdJug, AdConion, Context Web. Please click on the provider name to visit their opt-out page.

Sponsored by
Dragons Den star gives firms a boost on Twitter

Top stories

Community