Call it “microblogging” if you will, but Twitter is a lot more
than a blog platform. It is, first and foremost, a communications platform.
It’s basically a public, internetworked e-mail system and SMS network. If you
are using Twitter simply as a podium to publish blurbs linking to your company
blog posts and press releases, you’re missing the point. Yes, you can and
should use Twitter to publish short insights and news. And it’s fi ne to link
outside of Twitter if the item you’re mentioning is longer than 140 characters.
But what you’re missing, if you focus exclusively on getting your
own word out, is the other side of the conversation. Just as in the real world,
the online social-media world stops listening to narcissistic, self-infatuated speakers,
the sort of people who pause in their monologue only long enough to say,
“Enough about me—what do you think about me?” Engaging in back-and-forth
dialogue and spreading the word about what others are saying are both critically
important parts of the Twitter ethos. Plus, it shows you to be generous of
spirit, open-minded to what others are talking about, and well connected.
Here are 12 steps for avoiding pitfalls and building a successful Twitter
program for your business:
Reserve a good, relevant username
With only 15 characters or fewer to play with, and with, oh, about
106 million users earlier to the party, your most urgent task is to come up
with a short, memorable, recognizable, intuitive Twitter handle: as close to
@YourBusiness as you can get.
Display a human face for your business
I generally think the handle of your business Twitter account should
be the name of your company, although others prefer names like @Jill_atCompany
to humanize the account and to allow several people to tweet for a single
company, an ideal approach for large firms. An example would be @Rubbermaid, “currently
tweeted by Jim Deitzel”—this approach is an ideal way to have your cake and eat
it, too. You get the recognizable handle. You get the face behind the logo—the
personality of the specifi c human being doing the tweeting. And if the staff
member should, at some point, move on to a different role or a different
company, the account can be “currently tweeted” by some new person, without
disruption to the brand.
Establish your specialty
You need an area of focus, a specialty and a perspective that’s
easily expressed in just a few words. Your focus should be on benefits, not products.
Sizzle, not steak. Your Twitter feed—indeed, all your social media efforts—should
ride the coattails of a bigger, more passionate lifestyle and social mission
represented by the market you serve.
Post frequently
Twitter is voracious. It demands at least daily postings to amount
to anything. Keep it brief, don ’ t overthink it, but feed it. Get into the
habit. If you establish a schedule of seven posts a week for Facebook, say,
plan to come up with 15 or 20 posts a week for Twitter. If you ’ ve done a good
job of establishing your specialty above, you can simply set up news alerts to
be informed of new developments in your market. Summarize them in under 140
characters and point a link to the article. You should also echo on Twitter
every promotional e-mail you send out and every company blog post you make.
Use hot-button keywords in your industry
Heavy Twitter users troll through Twitter search results or set up
alerts to follow topics of interest to them and the Tweeps who post about them.
Keywords could be the name of high-profile people or celebrities, news events,
companies, just the name of your market or industry, etc. Whether it ’ s surfing,
fat-free, Google Analytics, knitting, Scottish—whatever your niche, people on
Twitter are searching for it daily and will follow you if you ’ re a regular
poster on it.
Use popular hash tags, and promote your own
A hash tag is a single, concatenated string prefaced with the #
sign used to make it easier to find all tweets on a given topic or event.
Whether your topic or event is global in scope, or a niche business conference,
giving it an easy-to-remember hash tag is key to helping your audience to stay
in the loop.
Follow!
It’s not enough just to post and hope for the best. You ’ ve got
to actively build a network on Twitter, and the best way to have people notice
what you ’ re doing is to take notice of them. Search for members posting on
your topics of interest and follow them. Look at their own followers and select
relevant folks to follow. Keep a focused network that aligns with your
“elevator pitch” or area of specialty. When you follow people on Twitter, they’ll
generally follow you back.
Recognize your followers
When people follow you, take a moment tocheck them out. Some will
be blank-slate newbies or evident spam artists, whom you can ignore. But when
real people with an interesting stream of tweets follow you, follow them back.
Send them a friendly direct-message thanking them for the follow and looking
forward to getting to know one another. Maybe nothing will come of it—Twitter
is the least reciprocal of the social-media platforms—but it ’ s good form, and
you never know what will come of these connections.
Promote
Give the Twitter icon prominent real estate on your Web site.
Display the current feed widget on your home page. Pitch the Twitter feed in
your e-mail newsletter, and maybe even your catalog or other print media.
Retweet
Be listening for references to your brand, and when people say
something nice about you, retweet it. Retweeting the good word is an easy, effective,
daily discipline you should get into—it ’ s a great way to spread any good buzz
enjoyed by your brand, and it ’ s unique to Twitter.
Ask for retweets . This can be a
little crass, but if handled tongue in cheek or for a good cause, it can really
spread the word.
Attend or host a Tweetup
One of the coolest elements of the surge in online social
networking is that it hasn ’ t turned us all into lonely, isolated mouse
potatoes. Twitter fans have popularized the Tweetup, an in-person get-together
of related Twitter users. For the most outgoing and connected among us, online
social media is just a tool and a facilitator for the kind of personal and
business networking that even your grandmother would recognize. Today there are
more opportunities than ever to identify like-minded people in your vicinity—or
those attending the same event as you—who are interested not just in exchanging
Tweets, but in getting together in person, for drinks, a meal, a meeting, a
hike or bike ride, a street protest, performance art, you name it. When the
social connection deepens through in-person meeting, you’re really taking the
fullest advantage of social media’s rich potential.
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