Beginners Business Tweeting

Unless you’ve been swanning around on another planet (and if you have, welcome back), you’ll have heard of Twitter. I guarantee your customers have heard of it.

Twitter is a social networking tool that effectively allows for small talk on the web. Using it has been likened to being at a cocktail party full of interesting people, all of whom are happy for you to introduce yourself and have a chat. They’re at the party themselves because they’d like to chat to someone they find interesting and so on and so forth.

On the face of it, it’s a pretty frivolous idea but people are doing exactly what they do at parties. Some of them have a laugh, some of them are silly, some of them are sharing great ideas and some of them are networking.

It has the potential to help you open dialogues with customers on their terms and is at the same time an effective marketing and customer care tool. But you have to get it right.

DON’T PANIC

Let’s deal with the marketing value of Twitter first and I’ll revisit the customer care aspect in a later post. There are lots of people and organisations using it to sell products and services and increase brand awareness. Inevitably some are good and some are bad.

If you use Twitter in the right way you will have an open, welcoming and visibly growing audience at your finger tips, providing you with constant, quality feedback and helping you spread the word about your business.

If you get it wrong you have the potential to alienate millions of people who between them have a massive web presence.

again DON’T PANIC

Although you can get it wrong it’s quite hard to do. You have to remember that Twitter is a conversation. As soon as you try and broadcast, unless you have a genuinely useful stream of information, people will tune out and they’re gone. This is a simple and (at least for the moment), free way to engage with millions of people. The key word here is engage; announcement after announcement about how great you are won’t work. No matter how great you are.

So what you need is a strategy. Ideally you already have a social media strategy, perhaps as part of a wider marketing strategy, which will outline your approach to the various social networking sites. If you don’t, don’t worry, you can hire us to write it for you.

I’m not going to write a strategy for you here; partly because we do this for a living and like to get paid for our work and partly because I don’t know anything about your brand or organisation. That’s no reason for you not do dip your toe in the ‘twittersphere’ so here are seven completely free tips for you to try:

1. Twitter is free but not effortless: You will get out of it at least as much as you put in but you need to devote some time and therefore resource to it.
2. Think about the tone of voice for your tweets: Twitter is informal but it’s not generally rude and it’s like (I know I’ve said it before) being at a party. It’s a party with your customers or people who know your customers. They’re enjoying the witty banter but they are paying attention and they will remember that they’re your customers so you must too.
3. Share: Twitter is a community which means people share things. Share information with others. If you add a web page, write a blog post or even just stumble across a piece of news (even vaguely) related to your sector, share by tweeting a link. Comment on it if you like but share it.
4. Follow people: You don’t have to wait for people to follow you before you can follow them. Work out if they’re a customer, a potential customer or in a related field and follow them. Say hello at the same time – it’s only polite.
5. If someone follows you, follow them back: They’ve voluntarily engaged with you so you should return the favour. There are tools available which allow you to do this automatically but I’d suggest that you check that they’re real and that they engage with other real people. I’m proud to say that I’ve been followed by Barack Obama (I’ve still got the email to prove it) and although I know it was probably automatic, I’ll choose to believe that he followed me because I’m cool.
6. Talk to people: This is all about the conversation. You must engage with people and try and answer every question. If someone asks for your opinion and you feel it’s relevant and appropriate give it. If you can’t answer a question, for whatever reason, don’t be afraid to say so or to suggest an appropriate alternative.
7. Ask for things: If you want to know something – a bit of impromptu market research for example ask people, need bit of testing of a new product or service – ask. This is part of the give and take of a community.

If you want to try Twitter you’re welcome to start by following us – just remember to say hello and mention that you read this post.

If you want to learn more about using Twitter for business Ursus Media run courses to help you get it right first time. We’ll help with your accounts and provide all the necessary tools and instruction to ensure that you and your team can use Twitter efficiently and effectively. Just give us a call or drop us a line.