Twitter Tips and Basics For Business Part 1

Twitter Tips and Basics For Business Part 1

Twitter Tips and Basics For Business Part 1 880 461 Nathaniel Seevers

Twitter provides a tremendous opportunity for businesses looking to talk with and learn more about their customers and potential customers. What happens all too often, however, is companies sign up, toss a Follow Me icon on the website and wait for followers to show up. Twitter is a community of give and take. You should get to know your neighbors. Here are some pointers are running a more engaging Twitter account for your business.

Setup:

Let’s start simple. Step 1 is to put a damn image in your profile. If you’re a business, your company logo makes sense or a picture of your building, product, etc. If you don’t have a profile picture most users are not going to follow you because they will assume your account isn’t very active.

Step 2 is to add a bio. A good bio that describes what you’re about and what followers can expect by engaging with you. Make it real and human and simple to understand. You can use hashtags (we suggest you limit to a maximum of two) to connect with a certain category. Whenever possible include your city and state – it’s one more way people can relate to you.

If you’re looking to pretty up your twitter account here are some steps on designing it the right way.

Follow:

Follow twitter users who are relevant to things you want to know, things you want to share or maybe ideal potential customers or partners. Auto-follow back at your own risk. We don’t believe in it at Shout Out Studio. Quality over quantity is key when it comes to building your audience. You want to attract engaged and relevant followers. With auto-follow back strategies and pay for follower tactics you get a ton of spam-bots and fake accounts. There is no quick fix to building a quality following. It takes time and attention and consistent effort.

Listen:

As you build a quality following/followers group listen to what folks are talking about and how they’re talking about it. What hashtags are they using to segment the discussions? What information are they sharing? Take interest in what they’re interested in and consider how you may be able to contribute.

Chat:

Take all that good, good listening you are doing and then say something. It shouldn’t feel forced though. You should be using a voice that represents your brand. Have a sense of humor, or don’t. Be yourself.  If someone on Twitter is asking for advice on a subject that you’re well-versed in feel free to answer and try to help. You can ask questions too. Looking for recommendations on a certain app? Ask your twitter friends. People are usually eager to provide info.

Share:

Just like you were taught when you were a kid, sharing builds relationships. Tons of Twitter users search feeds every day for the great info that may help them in some facet of their lives. Some look for entertainment. Some are news junkies.

If you have a blog then you instantly have content to share on Twitter. But you can’t talk about yourself all the time and you can’t spend all your time telling people how cute their doggie twit pics are. Seeking out and sharing (curating) great web content can be valuable to your followers. Focus part of your tweets on a couple topics of interest so folks know what they’re getting when they follow you. It can be, but doesn’t have to be related to your line of work. You’ll find that Shout Out shares a lot of great marketing centered articles but we also promote happenings in our cities like new restaurant openings, volunteer opportunities, and fundraisers.

The point is Twitter is not a place for you to sell yourself 24-7. Avoid Social Media Sales Grenades. One could even apply the 80-20 rule – 80% of your Twitter activity you are interacting with others and sharing others’ content and 20% of the time you get to talk about yourself.

Now you may be thinking that this whole more engaged Twitter is going to take more of your time. That may be true. Fortunately, there are some great free and inexpensive tools to help you out and save you a ton of time. We’ll cover those in part two.

These are basics. For more details and insights on how to use Twitter for your business check out these swell resources:

Twitter for Business | Hubspot E-book

How to Use Twitter for Business | Social Media Today

50 Ideas for using Twitter For Business | Chris Brogan

 

Photo credit: Striatic

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