Best practices for using Twitter with your business
Posted on mandag, januar 19, 2009 @ kl. 18.49 by david
With a lot of inspiration from HubSpot and other marketing sites, I decided to write a blog about how to use twitter for my self and other customers.
So what's the deal with Twitter?
Twitter is basically your status update (similar to Facebook or MSN Messenger) of what you are doing at a given time.
Within 140 characters, you can use Twitter for all sort of personal or business updates or "tweets".
New Friends and Tweets (updates)
Twitter is a Social Network for finding people that you know or find "interesting" by the content of their messages or "tweets". Once you find someone that you find interesting you can "follow" them and you will be sent their tweets when they update them. Others can find your tweets interesting and begin to follow you as well. You can choose to follow them back, do nothing, or block them from seeing your tweets
Tweets can be both public for all to read by using the @ symbol, or they can be private between two members by using the D letter for Direct Message.
Your Feed / Account Page
Once you begin to tweet more regularly you notice that you are building up a list or log of your tweets, these are listed on your Account page located at http://www.twitter.com/YOUR-USERNAME
OK. So how will this help me sell more products?
Twitter should be used to meet new people that could be potential customers or leads that respond to your tweets/info/content.
You can also use Twitter for branding, brand management, customer relations, or even promoting your events or your website/blog.
Welcome to the party
Since Twitter is a Social Network, you should be out "mingling" and following others to gain a bit of status within the community. But before you go out for a night on the town, you need to be prepared.
- Create a personal account for yourself, to be used for personal a some business tweets.
NOTE: Make sure that you use your real name when you select a username and a nice picture. - Create a business account for the company and its employees, to be used for tweeting about the company as a whole.
NOTE: Username should be the company name and the picture should be the logo.
When networking with new people, its better to use your personal account to get to know them first. Then if they see you are following your own company or tweeting about some events of interest, they will eventually follow the business as well.
If you are using your personal account for business tweets, you could turn off some people that assume you work all the time and dont know how to have fun.
I've created these accounts on Twitter, now what?
Customizing your accounts should be your first step. By adding in enough information about you and your company, people should be able to contact you directly or find a link to your website with contact information. Adding a picture or logo and changing the background image and messing around with the colors will make the account pages unique. Get help from a professional if you want to add your own background images or create something spectacular.
After you are done with customizing, the next step should be to start tweeting.
So what do you tweet about?
Well since the idea is to meet people of the same interest, you could start by just being yourself and writing about your hobbies with your personal account. If you have a question, you could post that to see if anyone replies. You could tweet about a TV show, or event you are planning on attending. Pretty much write about things in your personal life while you are at home, and maybe discuss some work topics while at work.
Don't be a wall flower.
To gain an audience, you need to be outgoing. The same as in real life. If you are in a room with strangers, you need to start by introducing yourself. This is similar to finding someone on Twitter and following them. By clicking on the follow button on their Account Page, you are extending out your hand to say hello.
Twitter Search
By using search.twitter.com you can search on different topics and find people who have tweeted about those topics before. You can follow people that share your interests and possibly build a relationship from the things you have in common.
Become a stalker
Following people on twitter is kinda like a police stake-out or becoming a stalker, but thats ok if you are just starting out and looking for new people to meet. By following friends of a friend, you can gain popularity through referrals and other old school tricks.
In the end the more people who you follow, will lead to some will follow you back, which increases the chance of building a relationship that could lead to a potential customer, lead or even a sale.
The question is how you use your website with your business and personal accounts. With the personal account you can choose people within your hobby or maybe some associates. With the business account you should follow every single person that follows it.
Building your audience
Since you will be following people remember not to go over the top and click on hundreds of names. You should have a reason for clicking on the follow button. Common interest, attended the same webinar, or something that you could start a conversation with. If you wildly click on a ton of names, this could look bad when you look at the number of followers you have to how many you are following.
Getting people to follow you back is the big challenge with Twitter.
If people dont know that you are on Twitter, they more than likely wont find you without doing a search. Make it easy for people to find you on Twitter by adding your username to e-mail signature, website, even business cards.
Another way to help build you audience is to connect people with the right information.
If you have a .pdf or a document that might be of interest to someone, go ahead and send them a link. You could also try and find a way to connect people from different networks through you and common interests. Content within your tweets is crucial to people wanting to follow you.
Digging for gold and giving it away
A great way to gain followers is to tweet about the cool sites, links and videos that you dig up online. If you thought it was worth downloading, then chances are so will someone else. Bookmarks or anything of interest can and should be shared with everyone you know. Sharing is fun! People like others that share.
Communication is a two way street so shut up and listen.
People are tweeting all the time, so why not get in on a conversation? Instead of everyone out there shouting about this or that, start making conversation with questions and other suggestions by using the @ reply symbol and let people know that you are also listening.
OK already, enough with the etiquette, lets get to the selling.
So now you want people to come to you website from Twitter. Then you'd better have something for them to read or do. Start publishing content and tweet about it. Give something away for free or use a form for collecting leads.
List of leads
Another cool feature with the search.twitter.com is the abilit to subscribe to an RSS feed of the search results. This means if you search on your type of products, you can get a list of tweets that have your type of products in them. This can be useful for finding people that are out looking for solutions that you may have within your company.
List of testimonials
When using search.twitter.com, if you find someone talking about you or your products on Twitter, you can use the favorites feature to save it or bookmark it. This is excellent for creating a list of satisfied customers or testimonials that you never even asked for.
Promote events
By using the hash mark # for topics or themes, you can also apply it to upcoming events. By having everyone in the company tweet about the event, and tweet from the business account, you can link directly to the event page on the website for signup.
What about improving customer service?
Since your are already out there searching for tweets about you, your company and products, you might as well take the time to address the negative comments as well. By quickly responding and showing that you are listening will surely impress anyone. Twitter is faster than e-mail, it can be used almost like instant messaging. If you have a customers on Twitter and you need to get a quick message out, send it through Twitter from the business account. If you start using Twitter for more quick important updates, maybe they will start to monitor Twitter updates from you more frequently.
Last but not least, measuring what matters
You need to be measuring the results of your efforts. How many followers are you getting? How many replies do you get from each business tweet? Are people talking about you, your company and your products? Are the people you are following the right people? How many visitors came to the company website from Twitter and how many of those became leads?
By measuring what matters, you can find out what is working and what is not, and possibly find new people to follow or optimize the process of registering better or find the problems and fix them.
Finally, I hope you found this topic of using Twitter for business as interesting as I do. Using the internet to network with people which in turn sells products without all the extra cost of expensive advertising is a more natural way things should be done.
Thanks to HubSpot for their inspiration with their lastest e-book on How to use Twitter for Business
