Using Twitter for Business

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Twitter was launched in 2006 as a social media platform, where users can “tweet” what’s on their mind in 140 characters or less. As it has gained more popularity, business has got on board and embraced Twitter as another social media marketing tool. With this post, The Website Marketing Group team will explain how to use Twitter for business marketing and explain some jargon to help you sort your tweets from your tweeps and your hashtags from your RT’s.

Twitter’s Terminology

Before we launch into how to use Twitter for your business marketing, it is important to get you up to speed on the unique lingo of Twitter. Twitter has brought with it a while host of new terminology that we see as the first roadblock for new businesses wanting to embrace this channel as a marketing platform.

Hashtags:

  • are topics that people use with a # in front;
  • this makes them trackable;
  • using Hashtags puts you in the conversation;
  • it helps people find you and know you are an authority or an interested party for that topic; and
  • can use tools like TagDef to browse for hash tags or use ‘Discover’ on Twitter to follow Hashtags.

RT:

  • RT is to Retweet;
  • there is a button under each tweet that says ‘Retweet’;
  • it’s the equivalent to forwarding an email; and
  • it puts that tweet into your twitter feed, and is your way of saying you agree with or like it.

@:

  • use the ‘@ to involve someone – it’s like tagging on Facebook;
  • put it at the start and only you and friends in common see the message in their feed; and
  • put it in the middle and it goes publicly on your feed

How to Use Twitter for Business Marketing

Successfully using Twitter for Business Marketing has three major components:

1. Set Up Your Account

Set up your profile so that your business name is your username, (you may need to try different options to find a variant still available). Then decide if your display name is best suited to your own name (good for professional services) or again your brand name. Fill in the bio section considering if it is best about you as a person or your brand (tie back to what your website homepage focuses on). Then decide to link to Facebook – if you do, every tweet will automatically be replicated on your Facebook page. We see the downside to this is that if you RT, @ or use Hashtags, they don’t really make sense on your Facebook page.

2. Start Following People

If you are on Twitter go to the ‘Discover’ menu and type in keywords that are relevant to your business. You may want to find similar businesses, complementary businesses, people that educate on business development or people with an interest in your offer type. Following people gives you access to content that you can then RT for your followers benefit and in many cases the people you follow, will follow you back, helping your grow your twitter community.

3. Start Tweeting

From research, we know that from a business point of view the most powerful tweets are those with content to click through to 140 characters used to talk about the weather, your day or what’s for dinner is not the best business use of Twitter. The most important thing you should be tweeting is your blog posts, new and old. Use your characters to summarise what the post is about, perhaps give a hashtag to the topic and add a shortened link. The next best things to tweet are images, then links to products or services on your website, always using your 140 characters to maximise the appeal to your target to take action and click. Alongside creating your own content, use Twitter to share the content you find that you feel will appeal to your target market.

Managing your Twitter alongside with every other Social Media Platform

When you start playing in two and three arenas the time and ease to maintain each community individually can be overwhelming. Thankfully, there are tools designed to help. One of the good third party app is HootSuite , which has a free and a paid access option. The free version of HootSuite is sufficient to monitor Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and more for a limited time.

The most useful feature of HootSuite is managing Twitter. In the image to the left, you have added streams from Twitter to view your news feed, @ mentions and direct messages, as well as monitoring any hashtags you want to be a part of. Having this all in one handy location makes navigating Twitter far more efficient.

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