Twitter has been around since 2008 and has grown dramatically with over 25 million users (many of them businesses) and growing rapidly, who collectively ‘tweet’ over 30 million times a day and, you guessed it, growing rapidly. Officially known as ‘MicroBlogging’, twitter has a compressed entry feed of 140 characters, just enough to make a quick comment or post a link or two. This pressure to make every tweet count has had a dramatic effect on its outcome; some people are saying things that others find very interesting. Obviously most of the users on Twitter, as on Facebook, have a personal account and this can range from a 14 year old in his bedroom on the Isle of Man to Barack Obama using his Blackberry aboard Air Force One.
However, there are plenty of businesses using Twitter for commercial benefit; Dell have been active users of Twitter since its creation and have recorded $3m direct revenue as a result of less than $50k investment by Tweeting about deals on their PCs.
The opportunities are endless but one thing is for certain and that’s no matter how small or large your business you can’t afford to not use this hugely successful social media platform. Research shows that traditional advertising media has experienced a massive decline in recent years while digital marketing is on the increase at an increasing rate. To add to this, consumers are following a trend of trusting peer recommendations rather than listening to direct advertising. To put it simply a modern consumer will often act on a ‘Tweet’ before they will act on an ‘Ad’.
Here is a list of things to do if you want your business to benefit from Twitter:
- Build an account and immediate start using Twitter Search to listen for your name, your competitor’s names, words that relate to your space.
- Add a picture, a nice picture
- Share links to neat things in your community.
- Be wary of always ‘pimping’ your stuff it may work in small doses but most people will tune out.
- Promote your employees’ outside-of-work stories.
- Have more than one Twitterer at the company. People can quit. People take vacations. It’s nice to have a variety.
- When promoting a blog post, ask a question or explain what’s coming next, instead of just dumping a link.
- Ask questions. Twitter is great for getting opinions.
- Follow interesting people. If you find someone who tweets interesting things follow them and see who they follow.
- Share the human side of your company. If you’re bothering to tweet, it means you believe social media has value for human connections.
- Don’t toot your own horn too much
- Learn quickly to use the URL shortening tools like TinyURL and all the variants. It helps tidy up your tweets.
- Commenting on others’ tweets and ‘retweeting’ what others have posted is a great way to build community.
- Using a third party client like TweetDeck can allow you to manage multiple twitter accounts and see who is tweeting about you!
Most importantly don’t set up an account only to forget about it because you are too busy, Twitter is only getting bigger and if you’re not on it you WILL miss out, maybe not right now but soon enough. Remember if you can’t do it: Find time/Make time/ pay someone to do it for you because it will create a return and sooner or later you WILL feel the benefits.
And as usual, you can just ask us to do it for you!