Top Ten Ways to use Twitter for your business
- Give the account a person’s name, rather than the organisation’s name. For example we’ve opened an account in Helen Duncan’s name, our MD, rather than First Impression. First Impression had already gone anyway…another good reason to get in there quick, user names are going fast!
- Be polite and help people. It’s a bit like networking but online so just think of it in those terms. If you can help someone, it is likely to be reciprocated. And you never know who someone knows!
- Use your page to post a mix of advice, opinion and interaction.
- Build a network of targeted followers. Unfollow people who don’t update their accounts, don’t follow you back or don’t interact. Download Tweetdeck to track people who are using your keywords, then follow them and see if they follow you back. If they don’t, delete them and follow other people instead. You should aim to follow no more than 10% more people than are following you.
- Mind your language. Twitter is more casual than other forms of business networking and it’s great to put a bit of your personality into your posts but remember you are online and being too personal is not professional.
- Post links to your blogs and press releases. If they’re interesting and well written people will retweet them, comment on them and share them on other social networking platforms.
- Stick to a common theme. It can be quite broad – we want to use it for discussions about marketing in general. Remember that most of the time people don’t click through to your profile; they just look at their home page feed of everybody’s updates. Therefore you want to stand out as having useful things to say on a particular topic.
- Write what your followers want to read. It’s the same principle as blogging: your content will be far more ‘sticky’ if you write about topics that actually interest other people rather than simply posting mini sales pitches for your company as this will get really boring.
- Promote your Twitter account. Link to it from your website, your email signature and any industry forums you belong to. Twitter is free, it’s easy to use and if you stick with it you can generate new customers through it and keep in touch with your existing customers.
- Post updates regularly- but not too regularly. Logging in two or three times a day for a few minutes is enough.
