I’m convinced Twitter is the best social network for business. Many companies tell me about their unproductive Facebook page. Often, the story is that they have some “likes” but it hasn’t done anything for their business. That is all too common. Customers don’t want tons of company updates in their personal stream and they aren’t likely to engage with you on Facebook. That isn’t true on Twitter.
As I’ll soon explain, Twitter is a great platform for businesses to learn from and connect with customers. And in some cases your customers are posting on Twitter hoping for a reply. Don’t miss this opportunity.
However, before jumping into social media activity, consider what you’d like to accomplish. Are you trying to resolve customer issues? Reduce negative comments? Grow leads? Find & strengthen new connections? Start with the end in mind – that will guide your efforts. Regardless of your business objective(s), Twitter can be valuable to you. Find the reasons why below.
Here’s why Twitter will rock your business:
- Connections! Twitter is the easiest and fastest way to make new connections (versus other social network sites). Connect with existing customers, plus find and meet new people. It is easier to make connections on Twitter because there are no barriers and no inhibitions. No fear about personal information being seen (like on Facebook). This means people are happy to check out your profile and follow you back if they like what they see. Quick and easy. You follow others, and a percentage of them will be happy to follow you back.
- Twitter is easy to use and easy to get started. Go to twitter.com and decide on a Twitter handle (your company name works well). Then post a company logo or personal picture (of whoever is manning the twitter account), write up a short description of your company and include a link to your website. Pick a pre-made background and, voila, you are ready to tweet. Later you can make a custom background – include a few key facts about your company/ service & contact information for your business. (The background is just one big image, put the content on the left side.) No uploading tedious information, photos or whatever (think FB timeline!). Just go!
- It’s easy to listen and respond to the conversation across the Twitter-verse. Please do yourself a favor and use hootsuite.com to post your Tweets and listen to conversation. It works in a column format. One column shows the tweets of those you follow, and you can create another column for your direct messages (private messages), another column for mentions (when you @name appears in a tweet) and another column or two for keyword tracking. Keywords are the way to listen in to all twitter users across the world. For example, you can use keywords such as “internet marketing” or “CRM” or “CEO” – 3 keywords per column are allowed in hootsuite. I have 2 columns. Try it out. You won’t believe how easy it is to see everything from one screen (you will have to scroll to the right to see all the columns, but it’s worth it).
- It’s quick to check in, reply and move on. After you are set up, tweet some messages and start to follow people (see followerwonk.com and search by keywords for people to follow). Then just check into Twitter once or twice a day (via hootsuite). Look at the various columns and see where you can tweet or reply or thank someone for a great idea. It’s easy and it doesn’t have to be super time consuming. (Unless you want it to be.) You can tweet to anyone – even those you don’t follow.
Those are my reasons. How are you using Twitter or other social media platforms to aid your business strategies?