Twitter for Dummies - Laura Fitton [83]
When you first dive into Twitter for customer service, you may see negativity about your company, particularly at first. Keep going. The best part about Twitter as a customer-service channel is how you get feedback when a customer leaves satisfied. Many satisfied customers send out thank-you tweets that all their contacts see, which gives you instant good public-relations buzz — and that kind of buzz is priceless. Letting go of control (you don’t necessarily have control anymore anyhow) of your brand and engaging publicly with dissatisfied customers can really get that goodwill going.
Networking on Twitter
Whether you do it via Twitter or an old-fashioned Rolodex, your business, personal, and career success depends heavily on a little thing called your network. If you’re looking for ways to network more effectively — or you want to find interesting, valuable people efficiently — Twitter can help you build up a genuinely interesting, astonishingly relevant, and powerful network. Entire new horizons of opportunity can open up when you finally connect with the people that are right for you. Building a network comes naturally on Twitter. The platform makes it easy to interact and connect with people and businesses who share your interests and goals, and because of @replies and other links between Twitter networks and Twitter users, to randomly interact with and discover interesting new people along the way.
The more you interact on Twitter, the more your network increases. You can build almost any specific type of network on Twitter, too. Twitter offers access to all levels of people and businesses, from those seeking work or a better social life to CEOs and national politicians.
One of the most interesting phenomena on Twitter is the communication and collaboration that can occur while businesses network with one another in public. Twitter offers a level of transparency that erases normal boundaries and rivalries. Take, for example, the CEOs of competing companies IntenseDebate (http://intensedebate.com; @IntenseDebate) and DISQUS (http://disqus.com; @disqus), two companies that build comment management software for blogs. Through a debate in Twitter, they collaborated on some cross-functional features in their otherwise rival products to make both companies’ customers happy and solve a problem.
Twitter can also help business networking in the employment sector — it’s a fantastic way to meet and evaluate new employees, and also to find new work. This movement towards a “Hire 2.0” culture (applying so-called Web 2.0 technologies to the job market), creates a more open and flexible hiring environment for all kinds of companies. You can observe potential employees while they talk about what they know, get referrals from people who know them, and introduce yourself — all in real time. Twitter also efficiently harnesses networks of loose ties — the friends of friends who are more likely to know about job opportunities and job candidates.
Freelancers who network and collaborate on projects can use Twitter to find former colleagues from past companies with whom they lost touch, and to get to know their existing employees and customers. We really can’t overstate how versatile a networking tool Twitter can be. In so many ways, Twitter acts as a portable business networking event that you can pop into when the time and availability suit you. Bonus: You don’t have to talk to anyone whom you don’t want to.
Offering Promotions and Products
If you represent a company that has something to sell, you can find a unique home on Twitter. You may need to adjust your messages a bit so that you can shift from a hard-sell philosophy to an attitude of interaction and engagement that doesn’t necessarily follow a direct path to a sale. But after you find and flip that switch from “talking at” to “talking with” potential customers, people on Twitter can interact with