If used wisely, Twitter can help your business to grow
3 years, 2 months and 1 day is the time between the first tweet and billionth tweet – and this relates only to the beginning stage of social media growth. Today’s numbers are even more impressive – can you imagine that people are sending on average 140 million tweets per day?! Judging by this statistic it might seem that all of the users should be experts of tweeting by now. But the reality is often different. Daily I stumble upon the company profiles which still implement hard sell on Twitter by treating the network as another selling platform. (See our previous article “The story of new friendship: Listening, Talking and Social Media” to find out why you shouldn’t).
To my mind, in order to successfully deliver the message through the Twitter profile, which is used for communicating with clients, there is a need to develop the set of rules and integrate them in your overall marketing and particularly social media strategy. In order to make it clearer, I would like to share my list of rules – some of them borrowed from another marketing experts, some developed through working within the network and some while observing others doing it.
- Use hashtags related to your #industry. This will ensure that public of the conversation is broader than just your followers – give people a chance to find your tweets.
- Unfortunately, as many of business profiles are not managed by a social media executive, but the person within the company who has some free time for that. It is not good to leave twitter for those few moments; schedule some tweets if you know that later there will be no time for that.
- Every brand has to aspire to be more than a company. It should be a personality – so behave like one. Tweet like human, because no one wants to talk to a robot (sorry, if you want – the world is changing so rapidly that I might be wrong about this)
- Even though the tweet can contain 140 characters, try to use 100 characters (120 at maximum) to make it retweetable. First of all it attracts attention and, secondly, people can add their comments when retweeting.
- Here’s another trick for creating a retweetable tweet. Have to admit that this one is not mine, but as I have been using it for a while, honestly, I don’t remember where does it come from. If author is reading this post now – thank you for a great advice! Here it comes: Add 5 to your twitter name and subtract it from 140. The result is your “retweetable” tweet!
- Too often I see links without any explanation of their contents. Whenever you use multimedia add the description to it.
- If you are using twitter with a purpose (which you should), don’t leave it unattended. There is no way for building friendships if you just disappear and come back whenever you have time.
- This might seem contrary to the previous advice, but I would not suggest tweeting more than 5 times a day. Some time age I read an article which stated that after this number tweeting is as helpful as not doing it at all.
- Following my last weeks post I will repeat – don’t be afraid to communicate. If there is an interesting tweet, then why not to comment on that? Talk with and retweet others to create twitter friendships.
- Use RT @username instead of Twitter created option for that. It will allow other’s to reply to this.
- Twitter is good for busy hours (7AM-8PM), Facebook for (8PM-7AM). This, of course, will depend on your target audience and company type, but mostly this is the schedule I use.
- Links make it more likely to be retweeted – simple as that. Don’t over use this though, when something is too much it will only do damage.
- If it is something important, ask for retweet or RT. There is nothing bad in this, really! Considering that the business builds friendships on twitter, you can ask for a little favour.
- To make it more personal and natural, use images. The images does not have to sell your products – simply let people be a part of your life. This might be done my posting pictures from events, parties, talks. It usually leads to a higher engagement.
- Say Thank you for retweets, because it is polite to say thank you for the compliments.
- Use #ff (Follow Friday) to recommend interesting users and #Fridayfun for tweeting jokes on Friday. This is kind of a “Twitter party” on Friday. I have seen many viral hashtags used on special occasions, but these two are my favourite.
- In order to let others join the conversation, the profile has to be easily accessible from various directions. Easiest way to do this is to integrate twitter profile with other networks.
- If you want to keep existing or potential clients updated (or simply increase the number of followers) add the link of the twitter profile to email signature.
- When the number of followed people grows you might want to segment them based on the industry, topics they tweet about, your relationships with them or any other criteria you wish to use. Twitter offers an option to create lists of people whose tweets you don’t want to miss.
That’s it – I have shared the list of little guidelines I try to follow daily. If you have more or you do something differently, please, feel free to share. I believe that learning never stops and would be glad to add some secret tricks to my list.
This post was written by Diana Lauska at Coretium
Reference:
http://www.jeffbullas.com/2011/08/29/5-cool-social-media-infographics/
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