How To Use Twitter For Business

Twitter is one of the most popular but also least understood social media networks. By using 140 characters, users are can express thoughts, articles, photos, and links. By using hashtags (#) users are able to find content or “tweets” about topics they are interested in. The key to twitter is publishing often and effectively to grow your audience. Here are some tips on how to get started with Twitter.

1. Set Up Your Account

 Choose an account name that is the same as your business, or as close to your business name as possible. Who in your company will be in charge of the account? Your need someone that is able to make updates regularly. Outsourcing a social media service is a good idea if your company does not have time to allocate to social networking. Once your account is set-up, make add callouts within your marketing channels (e-mails, website, blog, ect.) asking viewers to follow and link to your profile. If you have followings on other social networks, make announcements to your followers with links to your Twitter profile. Twitter also have an invite e-mail contacts feature, which you can find in your profile settings. This can be a great way to get an initial group of followers.

2. Figure Out Your Goals

 What would you ideally like to achieve through Twitter? While increasing conversions is the obvious answer, how will that best be achieved for your business? For B2B, positioning yourself as an industry thought leader may be the value twitter can provide. By tweeting valuable content, following, and retweeting information from industry leaders, you can acquire new prospects. For retail and e-commerce, this can be a new channel to push your already existing promotions. Having Twitter exclusives sales, or contests like “Tweet to Win” can help generate new customers.

3. Start Interacting

 Twitter is supposed to function as a conversation between users. You cannot only talk about your brand and expect others to be engaged. Start by following accounts that are related to your industry. This will give you a feed of valuable content that you can re-tweet to your own audience. By building relationships with other thought leaders in your industry, you are more likely to have them re-tweet your content, and build your audience. Another way to reach new users is to look for topics related to your industry by searching hashtags in the search bar at the top of your feed. See what your target audience is talking about and re-tweeting, use that information to gauge the content they are most interested in.

4. Drive Traffic To Your Site

When posting promotions and content on Twitter you should include URLs directing back to your website. Since text is limited, using a URL shortener like Bitly can give you more characters to work with. You can then use Google Analytics to measure your inbound traffic. There are simple pieces of code you can add to your pages and blog posts so users can tweet your website URLs out to their audience, creating reciprocated traffic.

Twitter can be an effective lead generator if you have a solid strategy in place. At EmoryDay, we take the guesswork out of social media so you can focus on other aspects of your business. Contact us today for a free consultation.