Using Twitter for business
Hot on the heels of the last post about Facebook comes this one about Twitter. I’ve briefly talked about Twitter before (click here to read the post) but having now used it for a little while I thought I would give it a post of it’s own.
Twitter is similar to Facebook in that it’s a social networking tool which allows you to update people by writing short lines of text which is posted to your (and your followers) Twitter feed. Anyone can follow you, unless you protect your tweets, but doing that defeats the whole point of Twitter. So, the main difference between Twitter and Facebook is that you don’t need to know the person you are interested in to follow them. I follow a mixture of local businesses, international celebrities and family members!
The other noticeable difference is that with Twitter you are allowed a maximum of 140 characters to tell the world what you are doing. There are no quizzes, no applications, no photo galleries, nothing like that, just 140 characters of text. You can link to whatever you like, but Twitter’s appeal is it’s simplicity.
I have to admit that at first I just didn’t get it. Twitter just didn’t make sense. I can perhaps understand why Facebook users may be interested in what I was doing because I already know them, but why would strangers care? Who would want to know what I was having for lunch, or what I had bought at the shops that day? Once I started using it though it started to make sense.
So, how do you get the best out of Twitter for business? How can you make it work for you? As Twitter is such a new thing there are no hard and fast rules, and most of us are making it up as we go along, but I have a couple of rules of my own which work for me.
- Firstly, Twitter is a social networking tool. It’s about following people you are interested in, and in turn it’s about people who are interested in you following what you have to say. There is often an impulse to automatically follow anybody who follows you, but be selective about this. There is a bit of a backlash now against those who follow people purely to get them to follow back, so think for a second before you do this. There is no point in having 500 irrelevant followers, better to have 10 useful ones!
- Next, get involved with your network. Ask questions, post answers, provide links to content they may find useful, be an asset to them so that when they come to clear out those they no longer wish to follow you are not on that list.
- Be careful of how many tweets you post at once. There is nothing worse than blasting out a dozen tweets within a 30 second timeframe. This hogs your followers Twitter feeds and is the quickest way to get you unfollowed.
- Complete your bio info on your Tweeter profile. If somebody decided that they may like to follow you then they’ll want to know a little about you and where you are based before they do. Provide this to them or you risk losing them.
- Do more than promote your own agenda. Users who purely self promote won’t be followed for long. Of course self promotion is really what most users are after, but be sensible about this. Try and write a mixture of posts, some of which may refer to your site or blog, but others which comment on someone else’s blog, a news article or other item of interest.
To quickly summarise, I’ve found that the real benefits of Twitter come from being involved with the people you are following and the people following you. It’s not just about advertising your product to as many people as possible, it’s about becoming actively involved with them, engaging with them and benefiting from their experience in their field.
If you’re a business, and you’re not yet tweeting then you’re missing a trick. Get involved, sign up for an account and get following. Visit http://www.twitter.com to get started.
