Whether you see it as cause for celebrating or lamenting, social media use is on the rise among businesses of all sizes. With a growing array of platforms, it can be tough to determine where to spend your time. Whatever you decide, you can feel confident including Twitter in your mix. Promoting your business on Twitter is extremely cost-effective and the 140 character limit keeps communication simple.
Despite this simplicity, Twitter offers so many opportunities for branding, customer engagement, and advertising that you may not know how to focus your efforts. If you take the initiative to use Twitter correctly, you’ll be on the fast track to growing your business.
Integrate Twitter with all marketing activities.
Integrating Twitter into all of your marketing activities delivers maximum impact. If you’ve already developed some content, you can open it up to your Twitter audience in the following ways:
- If you’re planning a webinar or event, tweet about it in advance with a link to the registration page. After the event, share highlights like poll results or interesting conversations.
- Ask a question that's answered in your latest blog post and link to it.
- To build brand personality, tweet photos of employees behind-the-scenes.
- Ask for customer feedback on your latest video or print ad.
Bring in new followers with offers.
Investing time and energy in growing your following is worthwhile: followers are proven to drive sales and recommendations. In fact, people are 72% more likely to buy from a small business after they’ve followed or interacted with them on Twitter.
You can increase your base quickly by leveraging your existing followers. A simple but effective tactic is to offer a Twitter-only reward or promotion to any follower who retweet your offer or mention your business. Just don’t forget to link to offer details with terms and conditions and include an offer code to track usage.
Track the impact of Twitter activity.
Determining the ROI of Twitter investments can be difficult and, not surprisingly, plenty of small businesses give up. But everyone can and should be tracking the basics: Has your number of followers increased? Any growth in audience is valuable, as each follower increases your ability to connect with many new customers.
Another gauge of success is how many people are retweeting and favoriting your tweets. You can look to tools like Google Analytics or TweetDeck to take some work out of tracking metrics, or enlist the help of a digital agency that specializes in small business social media.
Use tweets as testimonials.
Tweets can reduce the headache of managing and promoting customer testimonials. You can capture positive tweets right from the source, eliminating any question of truthfulness, and add them as embedded tweets to your website.
Twitter will provide a code that you can paste into your website, giving you a new testimonial right from the customer’s mouth. This is a great example of how Twitter has taken the heavy lifting out of small business social media activities.
Stay on top of what people are saying about you.
Are people talking about you on Twitter? Tweets about your business and products/services are worth tracking. You gain unique visibility to what people are saying by virtually eavesdropping on conversations about your business—the truth without filters. In Twitter, you can search your product or business name to see what people are saying about you. You can even conduct a poll to get specific information.
Monitoring your mentions also lets you know immediately when you need to respond. An easy way to build relationships is to favorite and retweet positive messages, and to offer a genuine “thank you.” When you catch the (inevitable) negative comment, you can address it immediately and minimize damage to your reputation.
Keep tabs on competitors.
Twitter search lets you easily keep an eye on competitors’ activities and reputations. Following businesses that are similar or complementary to yours, even if not direct competitors, can provide valuable insights, too. In doing this, you can use their successes as inspiration and their failures as opportunities for you to swoop in and capitalize on it.
Utilize the paid advertising features.
While this isn’t entirely necessary to be successful on Twitter, you can sponsor tweets with Quick Promote, which simplifies paid advertising for small business social media campaigns. In a few clicks you can choose a Tweet to promote and set a target number of people you want to engage with it. Twitter then targets it to users with similar interests.
Twitter delivers a unique combination of simplicity and powerful impact, making it a platform that should be central to any small business social media strategy. By implementing a handful of proven tactics, you can unleash the power of Twitter to help you connect with customers, build your brand, and grow your bus
