Twitter Tips for Business to Business Marketing
0
Footballers, pop stars, wannabee celebrities, politicians and Presidents; they’re all taking to twitter with relish. Barely an hour goes by when we’re not treated to the ins and outs of their often spectacularly boring day and the less than salubrious antics of their nocturnal activities The infamous Piers Morgan in his Daily Mail column shared recently how he uses twitter to contact the stars on his wish list, with Cindy Crawford being the latest to send a twitter message confirming her willingness to be interviewed by him (or as is his style, fawned over with a touch of humour by way of a redeeming feature).
It’s no wonder that with twitter garnering so many headlines on a daily basis that millions of small businesses have dived into it, often with gay abandon whilst millions of others are teetering on the edge waiting to pluck up courage, questioning their motives. Is it intrigue, fear of missing out on their next big deal or being accused a laggard as their more social media savvy competitors join twitter that is leading them to the twitter universe?
So, what’s the big deal with twitter?
Well firstly it’s free which is always appreciated in times of austerity!
It’s easy to use too.
Twitter lets you specify which Twitter users you want to follow so that you can read their messages in one place. You can easily follow thousands of users and by selecting those people that work in the same arena as you and your business, you can listen in and enter into conversations conducted between users with similar interests to yourself. On the other hand, of course, Twitter can also be actively used as a tool to push out marketing messages about your business to other people including potential clients, influences, introducers and journalists.
Part of the charm of Twitter is that all messages are limited to 140 characters and you can choose to allow your messages to be read by all, or limit them to be private and read only by a specific individual.
Advantages of twitter include
- It’s online networking at its best. Quick and easy. Connecting with people, sharing ideas experiences, information, resources tools and opinions.
- It provides instant support. Solutions to problems and answers to questions can reach you in seconds.
- It’s an easy way of keeping informed of news and developments in your areas of interest.
- Immense reach. If you manage to strike a delicate balance between sharing genuinely interesting and appropriate nuggets about your thoughts and your daily activities with business news and updates on your latest products or services, you can strike gold with an army of new customers. One tweet can be retweeted to thousands of people in seconds.
- You can inspire people to want to find out more about you, to visit your website, subscribe to your blog simply by creating an interesting tweet and including a link.
But like all fairly new tools where the rulebook is being constantly rewritten, if you want to gain from your relationship with twitter, there are some common sense etiquettes to observe. For example:
- Once you have signed up to twitter, spend some time completing your profile. You have 140 characters in which to write your mini profile and you can update it at a moment’s notice. Let people know who you are and include any notable achievements or expertise. Often the first place that a journalist, an editor or a potential client will look for you or someone like you is on a social networking site. Make sure that your mini profile is not so uber trendy that it fails to include anything about your professional status.
- Spend some time familiarising yourself with twitter before you start posting tweets. Draw up a list of the people that you would like to follow on twitter including people that inspire you, businesses that you are interested in finding out more about, current and lapsed clients, suppliers, potential clients, journalists and editors and so on. You may not want to actively follow competitors, but once you are signed up to twitter, you can search for them and periodically pop in and read what they are tweeting about. Start reading the tweets of the people that you want to follow. What opinions are you forming of them? If they are not favourable, take this as a lesson on how not to tweet.
- Under no circumstances use the default egg image as your avatar. Either have a nice smiling picture of you or an image of your company logo. Ideally it should be a picture of you because twitter is about being sociable. Being able to see what you look like will enable your followers to connect more readily with you.
- Make a commitment to tweet on a regular basis. There are no hard and fast rules on how many times a day or indeed a week you should tweet. The danger however of flooding your followers with 10 or 15 tweets in one go is that they will quickly tire of you. Be sensible. If you can post a few tweets a day and can join in with some of the conversations that are happening that is good enough.
- Be present. Yes you can automate your tweets and you can set up auto responder messages to people that follow you. But this will not win you friends and influence people. Social media is about becoming sociable and sharing and being present as much as possible so that you can enter into appropriate conversations and even share favoured tweets from others with your followers (the fastest way to gain those followers you would like to include in your twitter tribe!) If you focus on being efficient on twitter with all manner of auto responders, you will begin to shed followers and only attract people that embrace similar tactics.
More twitter tips to follow next week… in the meantime please share your favourite twitter tip and what turns you off big time!
Please Follow us on Twitter
Leave a Reply