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Using Twitter for Business – What You Need To Know


Using Twitter for Business-Blog

Do you want to use Twitter for business? You’ve heard about Twitter. You’ve been told it can be a great social media marketing tool. But what it is? How can it help your business and is it right for you?

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a social media site where users can send short, punchy messages (known as Tweets) up to 140 characters long. Tweets can include images, links, videos and animated gifs.

People can subscribe to, or follow, your account and you can follow other accounts. Twitter has a global audience of around 320 million people, so there are LOTS of opportunities to promote your business.

Twitter is best known for news, celebrity gossip (and Donald Trump!). If used properly, it can be a great tool for business.

Twitter is all about connections. You can use Twitter to find, follow and build connections with the type of people that could matter to your business.

Top benefits of using Twitter for business

Building a targeted business network

It’s really easy to find, connect (and talk to!) people on Twitter.

Ideal connections on Twitter include:

  • Your existing customers
  • Potential customers
  • Business contacts
  • Non competing businesses or organisations that share the same target audience
  • People influential with your target customers (influencers)

Business research

Twitter is brilliant for

  • Keeping up to date with your industry
  • Finding out what your customers are talking about
  • Researching the competition

Boosting awareness of your business

People on Twitter like to talk and share!

If you hit the sweet spot with your content, people will share it. And if you share content from others, more people will get to know about you.

Following and sharing content from customers is also a great way of staying in touch.

Promoting content from your blog

Posts that link to your website or blog are great for driving traffic.

Given the fast moving nature of the site, you can also tweet links to the same content more than once.

Some top tips for driving traffic…

  • Include a link in your post, then suggest people click on it!
  • Use images in your posts
  • Incorporate 1 or 2 RELEVANT hashtags.

 Increasing visibility on internet search engines

Your social media profiles show up when someone searches Google for your business. Google will also show individual Tweets in search results if you have a popular profile.

Including links in your tweets encourages people to click through to your website. More website traffic helps with search engine rankings.

Telling your business story

People do business with companies they know, like and trust. Build engagement with followers by sharing content demonstrating what makes your business different.

Show real pictures of you, your staff, your customers – as well as behind the scenes photos of what you get up to day to day.

Share testimonials from happy customers.

You can also show your personality by sharing posts demonstrating your business values. If you support a local charity – share their content! If your business has a strong environmental focus, make sure you show that in your posts.

Generating leads

Yes, you can get leads through twitter.

How? Follow and engage with people. Share your own content, as well as content from other organisations.

A few things to remember about generating leads using Twitter.

  1. Don’t oversell! If all you do is talk about your own business, people will switch off very quickly. Make sure you also engage with people that follow you and share other useful content.
  2. You also shouldn’t undersell! Engagement on Twitter is great. But you should also be sharing some content about your business. If you JUST share content from others and never talk about YOUR products and services, you’re unlikely to generate many leads.

Disadvantages of Twitter for Business

Speed

Twitter is very fast moving. With around 500 million tweets sent per day, it’s challenging to stand out. Due to the sheer volume of content, your tweets will only be visible for around 20 minutes.

Time

Getting real results on Twitter takes time.

You ideally need to be tweeting 4+ times a day to make a real impact. That means creating your own content and taking the time to find content from other sources.

To build up a following, you also need to be finding and following accounts relevant to your business.

Character limit

You only have 140 characters to play with. If you’re not used to writing short, snappy content this can be challenging.

Scheduling

Scheduling social media updates is essential if you want to manage your time. Tweet scheduling is a relatively new feature in Twitter and you need an ad account to use it.

If you don’t fancy handing over your credit card details, you’ll need to use social media management tool. Hootsuite and Buffer are great options.

Getting the right Twitter followers

It’s easy to get Twitter followers. But getting the RIGHT followers is more challenging.

There are a lot of spam accounts on Twitter. To avoid wasting time, you’ll need to be very clear on who you want to interact with.

Is Twitter right for your business?

Short, informal and chatty works best on Twitter. If this isn’t you, Twitter may not be the best place for you.

Are your potential customers on Twitter? If you’re not sure, check out your competitors. Are they on Twitter? And if they are, how well are they doing?

Use a content tool like Buzzsumo to see where your competitors are successful. You can also see which social media sites are most effective for topics relating to your business.

Do you have time for Twitter?

The more you Tweet, the better your results will be. Twitter’s not the best social media site if you only have time to post once or twice a week.

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