Twitter for Dummies - Laura Fitton [79]
Twitter can have powerful effects on personal and professional networks. Sales professionals can use it to generate leads, journalists to locate sources, publishers to discover new content, or any business to create better relationships with customers. You can listen to and harness the massive flow of ideas and information passing through Twitter so that you can advance your business objectives.
You can use Twitter to create ad-hoc communities, organize and publicize live events, or extend an experience to a remote audience. You can sell directly — if you do it right — or you can just develop an inexpensive listening and conversation post among the very people whose problems your business solves. You can use Twitter to generate traffic to your business’s Web site. You can use it to solicit feedback. It can even make your company and brands easier for users to find on search engines such as Google.
First, it helps to take a look at some ways Twitter might fit with your brand.
Putting Your Best Face Forward
Businesses can use Twitter to talk to their customers and potential customers, and generally increase brand recognition. Given that Twitter has so many potential uses that are so diverse, how can you get started?
You can probably guess that your profile is your business’s face on Twitter. Even though many people use Twitter through a service on their phone or desktop, rather than through the Web page itself, assume that most everyone will at least look at your Profile page — if not the Web URL that you provide within that profile — before deciding whether or not to follow what you’re doing on Twitter.
Dress nicely on Twitter: Fill out the whole Profile page when you set up your business’s Twitter account and upload an avatar (in some cases, your company logo is appropriate, but in others an individual photo is better). Link back to your main Web site, and in turn, link to your Twitter account from your Web site. You need to verify that the business account is actually yours and promote the availability of the Twitter stream to all your customers. With a widget on your site, you can even tweet to your customers (keeping freshly updated content front and center) without them having ever even heard of Twitter.
Make sure that the Twitter Bio section, short though it may be, tells Twitter users about your business. Also, the content of your business’s tweets needs to honestly, transparently show what you’re doing on Twitter. Introduce the people behind your business’s Twitter account — they’re the people your Twitter readers and connections actually talk to, so let the individuals behind the keyboard shine through. (For more on polishing your profile, turn to Chapter 2.)
After you create a great Profile page, what do you do? Here are a few simple ways to get out of the Twitter background and into public awareness:
Listen. Pay attention to what’s going on around you on Twitter. Twitter users have fascinating things to say about pretty much everything, but more importantly for you, they may already be talking about you and your business. You’re going to want to find as many ways as you can to tune in. From using Twitter Search to sophisticated social-media listening tools, (see Chapter 9) you can get useful information from Twitter in many ways. If you think of Twitter as a giant consumer sentiment engine, you can start to understand its potential. You can learn a lot by listening.
Balance. For the average business Twitter account, you need to have a good ratio of personal (or conversational) tweets to business (or promotional) ones. This ratio depends, in part, on how much you interact on Twitter and what you hope to accomplish — not to mention the nature of your business and your target audience or customer base.
You may want to come up with an approximate numerical ratio that accomplishes your balance goals. You might