Twitter Marketing
By Cheryl Salazar, The Partner Marketing Group
Have you been using Twitter, is Twitter marketing apart of you social media strategy? Well, being a rather chatty person myself, I struggled to see how you can fit a story into 140 characters until I was listening to a chat show on National Public Radio a few days ago. They have a project called the ‘The Race Card Project: Six Word Essays’ where they are asking listeners to submit a story in just six words about race. They used Ernest Hemingway as an example, and when I heard the example, I realized that in fact there is a lot you can say in just 140 characters or less. The Ernest Hemingway example is: For Sale, Baby Shoes, Never Worn (33 characters total).
Each of us consumes information in different ways – some of us like to scan for information or read soundbytes, while others prefer to read something more substantial and engaging. In a nutshell, Twitter is just another forum for you to get information out about your company and the services you provide.
Hopefully you’ll find these tips useful for making the best use of Twitter for marketing your business.
Twitter Marketing for Business
What should you use Twitter for?
Have a good understanding of what to use Twitter for – if it’s to grow your business, develop a rapport with a prospective audience, show leadership, or drive interest in an event. These are all good reasons for using Twitter.
Who should you follow?
There is no general rule here. There are 10 Twitter User types you’ll always meet and is a personal preference for your business. Many well-known brands make good use of Twitter to get information out – do some research and adopt their best practices to help drive your Twitter content and cadence.
Don’t start frenzy and follow everyone. You’ll go crazy and Twitter won’t let you follow more than 2,000 people at first. That rule holds true until you have about 2,000 followers.
Who do I want to follow me?
Unless you’re famous, notorious or a large brand, it’ll be tough to build that list of followers. This is going to take constant work to get your follower numbers to where you want them to be. Focus on the quality vs the quantity. Watch out for spammers, bots and marketers and return the favor by following those who follow you.
What should I tweet?
As mentioned above, people consume information in different ways. You should tweet about all those things that you are trying to achieve in your business.
Examples include:
- links to blog posts
- updates on events
- new offers from your company
- incentives to buy
- interesting articles you have read
- additions to your company
- great customer stories and the list goes on.
Remember this is not a private forum, so if you don’t want the world to know, don’t Tweet it!
When should I tweet?
You should tweet at least once per week, minimum. If you struggle to Tweet regularly, you can utilize tools such as Butterfly, which is pre-populated with Microsoft Dynamics content, or Hootsuite, that you can reuse and schedule in advance.
And finally, how NOT to build your Twitter Community!
- Post content that is irrelevant or too frequent: Know who your audience is and avoid posting content that is irrelevant to your followers.
- Be boring! That is a surefire way for your followers to dessert you.
- Don’t return any favors and retweet content. If you retweet and share content from your followers, you up the chances of having them return the favor for you.
- Post long urls that don’t say anything: use TinyURL to truncate your url and use the remaining space to articulate something useful.
- Use Twitter to replace the face to face: Face to Face meetings will always be more valuable than anything electronic. Where you can, make sure to reach out and meet your prospects in person. People still buy from people, they don’t buy from social media.
Need Help with Twitter Marketing, Social Media Marketing or More?
If you want to get started on social media or need help optimizing your properties, we stand ready to help. For more marketing tips, visit www.ThePartnerMarketingGroup.com, or opt into our monthly newsletter by texting the letters TPMG to 22828.
