In September Mike Greene started his nationwide tour of the stores he would be taking on under the My Local branding.

It quickly became apparent that Mike was going to share his My Local experience through his twitter account @MGcomment and his executive team followed his example.

The tweets from the initial #mylocalstore tour set a style that Mike and his team have continued to use; find the best practice in every store, share it with the store team and everyone else.

Better Retailing contributor Jai Singh quickly saw the value to his business of the tweeted photographs of the category merchandising in the My Local stores. He is copying them and saving them so that he can easily refer to them every time he remerchandises a range.

Since My Local became a reality on 26 October a rapidly growing number of the stores have been setting up their own twitter accounts and sharing details of what they are doing both promotional and best practice. Bravo to them, My Local must be a really exciting company to be working for.

One of the challenges that Twitter users face once they have a few hundred people that they follow is that it is all too easy to miss what is being posted. Fortunately, Lists on Twitter provides a solution to mining the hundreds or thousands of tweets that arrive each day. Left click on your profile icon and you will see a drop down menu as shown in this image. 

I have so far built a My Local List of over 90 stores and people who tweet about the company. While there are still hundreds of tweets they are almost all about the activities of the My Local stores. I think they are a treasure trove of great ideas that any convenience store retailer can be enthused and excited with and it’s just waiting for you to look at.

I am also looking to bring order to the other fascia group retailers and suppliers that I follow to see what great practice and ideas they tweet about. In this digitally connected world you now have access to many of the best ideas out there to help you get the very best from your business.

Follow the launch of My Local in full in our special online feature