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4 Ways to Use Twitter for Business and Marketing

4 Ways to Use Twitter for Business and Marketing

Business of all sizes use Twitter for a variety of reasons – provide information, interact with their followers, promote their products and services, generate leads and monitor conversations about their company.

Maintaining an effective Twitter presence can be a powerful part of your marketing strategy. Despite its growing relevance, a lot of small businesses are still not using Twitter to its full potential.

In this blog post, we’ll teach you how to turn 140 characters into online marketing gold. Read on for some useful tips on how to use this popular social media platform for business and marketing.

Engage in two-way conversations

Twitter is a great platform to reach your audience. As a business owner, your goal for using social media is to build a community around your brand and to foster relationships.

Don’t go overboard with promoting your business. If you do so, people will stop following you. Keep an eye out for particular issues you could help with. Join the conversation and feel free to give some tips and advice.

Retweet

The last thing you want is to bombard people with tweets about your business. It is worthwhile to retweet particular tweets from other users that you find particularly useful or interesting. Sometimes, this encourages people to follow you. Plus, retweeting shows your followers that you’re also willing to share tips and advice, and you’re not just about flogging your products and services.

Customer service

80% of customer service interactions take place in social media. In fact, a lot of people post complaints and product queries on Twitter. Twitter is a great tool for customer service because it allows you to resolve issues in real time. Be sure to respond in a polite and professional manner. Don’t forget to thank the customer publicly once the problem is resolved.

Make twitter a daily activity

Social media marketing success does not happen overnight. You need to spend time posting updates, responding to DMs, thanking new followers, following new accounts, liking and re-tweeting other content and responding to other users.

Because twitter moves so quickly, it is not something you can handle whenever you have the time. Daily postings and engagement is important. Otherwise, people will forget about you.

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Tweet Science– One Reason Twitter’s Confident About Its Ad Possibilities

At Boundless, we know that Twitter is a powerful tool to help businesses grow and share information about it’s products and services. But lately, one of the big questions facing social media giant Twitter ahead of its New York Stock Exchange debut this week is how much money it could actually make for investors.

Here is an interesting article we found and wanted to share.

“We have incurred significant operating losses in the past, and we may not be able to achieve or subsequently maintain profitability,”the company writes, in its business prospectus.

Twitter expects revenue growth, but that it will be slow. We’ve written before on how it’s planning on cornering mobile advertising as its main revenue booster. These user numbers a new Pew/Knight study out this week help its argument.

Even though Facebook dwarfs Twitter in the number of users (Facebook’s at more than one billion to Twitter’s 200 million), the study shows those who consume news on Twitter are younger, better educated and more mobile than Facebook news consumers. That’s a huge selling point for Twitter in its bid to lure advertisers.

“Mobile devices are a key point of access for these Twitter news consumers. The vast majority, 85%, get news (of any kind) at least sometimes on mobile devices. That outpaces Facebook news consumers by 20 percentage points; 64% of Facebook news consumers use mobile devices for news. The same is true of 40% of all U.S. adults overall, according to the survey.

Twitter news consumers stand out for being younger and more educated than both the population overall and Facebook news consumers.

Close to half, 45%, of Twitter news consumers are 18-29 years old. That is more than twice that of the population overall (21%) and also outpaces young adults’ representation among Facebook news consumers, where 34% are 18-29 years old. Further, just 2% of Twitter news consumers are 65 or older, compared with 18% of the total population and 7% of Facebook news consumers.”

The study is based on survey data and a multi-year data analysis of tweets around news events.

That this group relies on Twitter as a “second screen” during major news events means Twitter can promise advertisers an “in” to target certain groups at moments they’re paying attention. The mobile-first behavior also plays well into the company’s revenue plan, as it recently acquired MoPub, the world’s largest mobile ad exchange, as a way to sell mobile ads that target their dedicated users based on data that Twitter has collected from them.

 

Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/11/05/243221309/one-reason-twitters-confident-about-its-ad-possibilities

For more on Twitter’s business prospects, check out Joe Hagan’s piece from New York Magazine,

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The 411 On Hashtags

Have you been using hashtags in your tweets? If you have not jumped on the hashtag train, you have no doubt seen them on Twitter.  Hashtags are the words, or sometimes just jumble of letters that you see following the # sign. Hashtags are not essential, or appropriate for every tweet. Before going hashtag crazy, it is important to know how they can help your business, and when they are actually useful.

Hashtags work for categorizing content. Adding a hashtag into your tweet makes it easier for other users to find. This can be extremely useful when discussing a topic other Twitter users may be discussing as well. For example, during the Superbowl you could search #Superbowl on Twitter and a display of Superbowl related tweets would be the result.

From a marketing standpoint, hashtags can also help to create some buzz around your product or business. For example, say you are the owner of a shoe boutique and you are having a sale on winter boots.  Tweet something about the sale, and then use the hashtag #winterboots. This is a broad category, and someone in the market for winter boots is likely to search “#winterboots.” By incorporating the hashtag into your tweet, your tweet will show up in the search results.

Keep the hashtag brief and easy to read. If you use the hashtag #WinterBootsAreHalfOffAtTheShoeBoutique it is not only hard to read, but it is also likely that nobody will search for that hashtag – and your tweet will not appear in any searches.   Your tweets are already limited to 140 characters, so use them wisely! Use hashtags to get your point across but still remain brief.

Remember there is no point in using a hashtag if you do not keep using it. In other words, be consistent with your hashtags. If you do not repeat the hashtag, your tweet may go unseen by potential customers. Make sure to use your hashtags. Last but not least, be sure your hashtags are relevant and easy to understand.  Twitter is about simplicity – so do not confuse your Twitter followers with a confusing hashtag.

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Making Twitter Marketing Work: 4 Important Steps

 

 

Twitter has over 100 million active users, making it one of the most noteworthy social media sites. For marketers, the potential Twitter has to offer is huge! Additionally, the latest brand pages that have been introduced make it an even stronger platform for promoting content to customers. Countless companies have successfully used Twitter to build-up their brand’s identity. However, while several marketers have climbed aboard the Twitter bandwagon, many have yet to efficiently use the tool as a strategic channel.

What could possibly be preventing marketers from maximizing Twitter’s marketing potential? The main issue involves the unconventionality of Twitter. Twitter technology looks, feels and acts very different from traditional marketing tools therefore it requires a unique approach. Businesses have to look at the wide variety of skill sets required to see the full advantage of the site, from Customer Intelligence, to PR to interactive marketing, separate departments must come together to fully utilize the site properly. Furthermore, the openness of Twitter means marketers must keep in mind the classic mistake of saying the wrong thing.

However, with the right plan, marketers can tackle current obstacles and find success through Twitter. Follow these four steps to get the most out of Twitter:

1. Train your team to use it well.

While employees may be familiar with Twitter’s growing social media presence, they still need to understand how the site works in all its complexities and understand how it is that YOU want them to use it. Lots of companies are training employees to use social media, but when it comes to Twitter, training and experience is especially important. Twitter has a unique language, behavior and uses that are very different from Google, YouTube or other sites.

2. Figure out Twitter’s role in your marketing mix.

When using Twitter, first decide why and how it fits in with your other platforms. It doesn’t matter if you’re making just one Twitter account, or several accounts. You need to understand how your customers are using the platform-are they just listening on Twitter, or are they actively speaking out? Unlike Facebook, brands can have more than one account, which may be useful for handling separate segments that have specific objectives, such as customer support, PR and direct marketing. With this in mind, each account MUST deliver a clear message of the brand to the audience.

3. Gain a strong base of followers and engage them.

For a Twitter account to be successful, it takes more than just setting up the account. Brand need to build an active base of followers for their content to have any impact. Next, different tactics can be performed to activate that community of followers to meet your brand’s objectives. For example, it’s important to keep the community engaged so conversation around your brand keeps building. A good way to do this is to use a calendar tool like Hootsuite to schedule content to continually go out to keep the audience active and engaged with your brand.

4. Push sharing and conversation in your account(s).

After developing your Twitter accounts and building a strong fan base, marketers can take a combination of relevant content, along with Twitter ads, to drive conversation and sharing. Twitter can be used to stimulate real-world brand interactions. Tweets can spark interest and energize your audience if you develop strong, relevant content, which in return will expand your brand’s presence in both the Internet and real world.

Always remember, your job does not end after you’ve completed this four-step plan. In the long run, it is absolutely necessary to be active in coordinating the proper use of the technology, and sharing best practices. This will successfully help your brand stay consistent with Twitter marketing!

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