Recently on the social media site, one of the most retweeted tweets among Saudi users was the traditional home-cooked food catered by Um Khaled. Um Khaled, a homeowner based in Riyadh, provides traditionally home-cooked orders to her clients.

Arab News spoke to the woman behind the tweet on Friday. “Since I started out this online campaign I have been receiving all kinds of orders for food from customers. On Thursdays alone there were 150 orders from families here,” said Um Khaled.

Um Khaled is among a growing number of other Saudi traditional home cooks who are astute enough to know the power of the social media sites to spread the word about their catering services, and they use it judiciously to increase their market share. Particularly, those who cannot afford to hire advertisement agency to promote their products or provide public relations services to market them, find the social media networks a useful tool.

Incidentally, Twitter’s early days in the US involved several small businesses and startups using the site to get more recognition from people.

Back in June this year, Twitter’s co-founder, Biz Stone, in an appearance at Aspen Ideas Festival in the US, told the audience that, “The beauty of small businesses in Twitter has not escaped us from the very beginning, because you don’t have to have a lot of followers.”

He added, “Early on I was in New York and I walked by a bakery that was, like, mostly did cookies. And they had part of a cardboard box with a magic marker that said ‘Follow us on Twitter when the cookies come out of the oven warm we’ll tweet.’ And I was like that’s genius.”

Stone said, "Because even if only 98 people in the neighborhood follow that account when, those guys say chocolate chip cookies coming out of the oven right now, everyone just gets out of the office runs down there, they just sold all their cookies. And all they needed for their entire marketing department was a sharpie and a piece of a box."

Um Khaled told Arab News that she plans to continue using the social media websites, to promote her home made products to her customers.