Crash Course in Twitter for Business

By Mon Gill Twitter is a useful social tool, but it’s also an incredibly powerful tool for businesses. It can be used for branding, marketing, research, and networking, but it’s also the ideal platform for connecting with your customers. Frankly, if you’re not on board, you’re losing out. You may want to use Twitter to increase brand awareness, but how do you use it effectively to engage people, and more importantly, reach potential customers? Why Use Twitter for Business? Any business owner or marketer can use Twitter to connect with customers publicly, so it provides a great opportunity to show the human side of your business. Through Twitter, you can answer customer questions, express opinions, and tackle negative publicity quickly and openly. In time, by showing your industry expertise, you can build your credibility, but its real power lies in its immediacy. You can quickly resolve customer complaints, offer daily promotions, and refine your brand’s personality. Understanding the Jargon First, it’s helpful to familiarize yourself with Twitter terminology. Here’s a quick glossary: Bio: A short description of 160 characters or fewer to define who you are on Twitter. DM (Direct Message): A private message sent from one Twitter user to another. Feed: The tweets of the people you follow all appear in chronological order on your homepage. This is your feed. Follow: To subscribe to someone’s updates on Twitter. To do this, click the â€Å"Follow† button on their Twitter page. Hashtag (#): A useful tagging system. Any word or phrase with the # symbol in front of it then becomes a link that users can find and follow. Mention: Referring to someone else in your tweet by writing their username preceded by the @ sign. MT (Modified Tweet): Similar to RT, this is placed before the retweeted text if you manually retweet a message with modifications, for example if you shorten a tweet. Trending Topics: Displayed on the right-hand side of your Twitter homepage. These are words, phrases, or hashtags that are popular on Twitter at a given time. Tweet: A post with a maximum of 140 characters, similar to a Facebook status update. Unfollow: To stop following another Twitter user and stop their tweets from appearing in your feed. Username: Used to identify you on Twitter, it’s also known as your Twitter handle. It must be unique and contain fewer than 15 characters. Optimize Your Twitter Profile When you sign up to Twitter you should complete all your profile. Include your location, website or blog link, and your company bio. Try to include your company name in the username to make it more searchable, and upload an image of your company logo. You bio is a one or two sentence biography about you or your business. Include keywords for your industry and relevant search terms to help lead generation. Start Building Your Twitter Brand Ultimately, Twitter is a tool to build and maintain customer relationships. By providing valuable information, answering questions, and avoiding too much promotional material, you can build customer trust and loyalty. First, you need to start posting tweets. These posts represent your brand, so make every one valuable. You can post tips, advice, opinions, facts, and industry news. Twitter is also a great place to promote your products or services by tweeting recent blog posts, press releases or any other writing your customers may be interested in. You can even link to a promotion placed on a specific landing page. Entertaining posts are also a great way to boost interaction and make your posts more shareable. Growing Your Twitter Network As you follow more people and join conversations, you will attract more followers and widen your Twitter reach. This is also your chance to find out about your audience. Twitter has its own â€Å"Who to Follow† tool, so you can search for key topics and personalities across the channel and build your network. The Twitter search tool also lets you search for specific words and phrases, so you can assess the competition and find out what people are saying about your brand. Make your Twitter presence known whenever possible. Get a Twitter widget plugged into your website or blog so that people can follow you directly from your site. Also display your Twitter handle on your website, in your emails, and on all your other social media profiles. Using social media tools like HootSuite and Sprout Social will also boost your Twitter power. As well as providing tools to automatically tweet your blog posts, they can help manage your company reputation too. By locating tweets about your company, products, and services, you can respond to any negative comments and solve customer problems to minimize bad publicity. Twitter is one of the most powerful social media marketing tools, as it enables businesses to show consumers they are making an effort to connect. It’s a promotional tool, but it’s also a platform to educate consumers and generate quality leads. If you give something back to the Twitter community, your business will ultimately reap the rewards. Looking for a place to start? Head over to Constant Content’s Twitter page to connect with us!