In my last blog I shared some of my thoughts on why your business might want to have a Twitter presence and we talked a little more about what Twitter actually is. Let’s look into this social media platform in a little more detail to see how you can benefit from your presence on it. Here are my suggestions for maximizing your Twitter business presence:

• Be clear on who your ideal customers are.
• Set up your Twitter profile, making sure all information, including any images you use, are consistent with your brand.
• Start following your customers, as well as your potential and prospective customers.
• Start tweeting: Generally speaking you want about 70% of your tweets to be about topics that don’t promote your own company. This might include links to online articles of interest in your industry, observations about the field in which you operate, internal company news, support for charities you support, calls for new hires, etc.
• Use the other 30% of your tweets to direct people to your website, Facebook, Linked In or You Tube channels, where they will find more information about your company, special offers, registration pages for your newsletter, upcoming webinar or other promotional event, etc.
• Respond quickly to any tweets that request service, air a complaint or express concern about your business.
• Acknowledge shout-outs and compliments.
• Retweet (RT) people to show them a little “Twitter Love.”
• Direct Message people where appropriate: You can’t DM someone who doesn’t follow you but the standard etiquette is that if someone follows you, you follow them back. Not everybody has this policy but that is one way to generate more follows on the platform. Don’t auto-DM people – it’s boorish.
• Include photos in your tweets.
• Don’t spam people.

Implications of all of this activity:

Twitter is another great way to keep your company name in front of your customers and prospects, provided they use the platform. The business applications of Twitter are still evolving and access is still an issue: the people who are managing the Twitter feed of many businesses tend to be junior community managers, rather than the decision makers, so if you are a BtoB company, your chances of speaking directly to the decision-makers are not great.

That being said, an active Twitter presence gives you another way to show up in the search engines, and another way for people to search for you, find you, and get an impression of your business and your brand. Even if you are not holding out high hopes for generating business in this fashion, you still need to be there because you just never know. I’ve had business leads from Twitter and I’ve made good connections on this platform that have helped me develop my business. You need to be there.

Me and my team members have many more ideas about using Twitter for business and if you would like to book a conversation about how we might be able to support you in growing your Twitter or other social media presence, please contact me at susan@crossmancommunications.com and let’s book a conversation about how we might be able to help.