Top 3 Ways To Use Twitter For Business
If you’re like most marketers, you’ve been using Twitter for a long time now… Perhaps even stopped using it.
Tweets go by so quickly. Auto-tweets have removed the novelty from Twitter, drowning users in a sea of impersonal, shallow tweets. You’re only allowed 140 characters to say what you want to say (around 90, if you want people to recommend when they Retweet). And everyone seems to say the same thing; mostly endless links to blog posts nobody reads.
Fortunately, a small percentage of the Twitterverse knows exactly how to leverage Twitter. If you run a B2B-type business, many of these may make up a large percentage of your potential client base.
The rest make up a strong networking community, whether or not your business is retail or service-based. So learn to use Twitter like the crème de la crème, and you’ll soon discover these top three tips really do work.
1. Harness The Power of Hashtags
One of Twitter’s most popular features has been the invention of hashtags. Well, Twitter didn’t exactly invent them – they were inherited from old-style IRC chat – but Twitter certainly has popularized them and used them most successfully.
A hashtag is born when one or more words is prefixed with the “#” symbol. This instantly lets Twitter’s search engine deliver any tweet containing that hashtag, if you search for it. It’s an easy way to filter out search results you don’t want and zero in on search results you do.
Create a great and catchy hashtag, and you can drive viral, targeted traffic to your products, website, blog, posts, articles, other social posts – and tweets.
2. Use Twitter to Reinforce Your Business Branding
The fact that your Profile photo appears next to each tweet you make can really help brand your business, if you follow these two best practices:
- Use your logo instead of your photo, if you are tweeting as, or solely for, your business
- Tweet regularly and consistently
You want to send out business tweets at least five days out of seven; preferably when you know your target audience is most often online.
Regularity is the key, just as much as consistency. (“Consistency” refers to the type and tone of your tweet: “Regularity” refers to exactly how often they occur.)
3. You Can Keep Momentum and Visibility Going While Other Networks Sleep
Another fascinating fact: When Twitter’s engagement is at its highest, Facebook’s is at its lowest. So you can keep the ball rolling from social network to social network, to suit different segments of your audience – and yourself!
There are tools to help you find out when your unique audience hits the highs and lows on both networks – Facebook Insights for Facebook and TweetWhen for Twitter.
The best way to figure out the optimum time for your audience, however? Getting into the habit of being there in person, seeing who’s online at the same time and who responds to your Tweets, or mentions you.
Learning when your ideal audience is actively tweeting in real-time will gain you more business advantage than all the automated pre-posting services in the world.
And with Twitter, all a tweet or personal retweet takes is a few seconds (and less than 140 characters).