Maintaining Twitter for Business
Managing Social Media is something many businesses will struggle to do, especially when it comes to a small company with only a few staff. The aim of this article is to let you know what you should be doing on a regular basis and what tools you will find beneficial to help you integrate this into your daily routines.
Each day, try to:
- Review people who have followed you (and follow back)
- Find new people to follow (specific to your business sector /industry )
- Look up competitors profiles and identify potentials in their follower’s list
- Search Twitter for topics that relate to your business and engage with users
On a regular basis, try and monitor your Twitter profile to see who has followed you. If relevant, follow them back. Some people will tell you to follow everyone back, but I don’t think this is the best way. Yes, if you simply seek the kudos of a large number of followers, blindly follow everyone who follows you, BUT the idea is to build up a ‘relevant’ network of followers.
Who should I follow?
There is no point following everyone and anyone.
There are some great people to follow and some which are totally pointless. I constantly come across people on Twitter with 60,000 followers plus and initially, it looks impressive BUT then I notice they are following 70,000. This just looks like someone who is blindly following anyone and everyone and it tends to make the profile tend to look false and pointless. Yes, there are many people who follow this user but are they interested in the business or just the number of followers.
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Justin’s Tip:
Feel free to go out there and find people to follow, but only choose to follow those you are interested in.
Keep an eye on the number you follow and try to ensure, those who follow you is higher than the number of people you follow.
In general, it looks better if you find a profile where they have more followers than people they follow.
Segment the people you follow into Twitter Lists. This is a standard feature in Twitter and allows you to separate the people you follow into lists e.g people I might wish to work with, industry leaders, something different, customers etc. Name the lists however you wish, but keep the people you follow in an ordered list, so you can digest the information much easier.
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Market to your own Customer Base
Customers always forget to do this and it’s the most basic form of building your audience. Look through the list of tips below and make sure you get some (if not all) of them put in place
- Get a FollowMe link added to your email signature (click here to get a button)
- Make sure each and every member of staff in your company adds the button to their e-mail signature (and test it)
- Make use of your e-mail signature for all forms of communication e.g email me, phone me, followme @twittername
- Make sure your business cards all have the FollowMe @twittername (obviously use your own twitter name please!)
- Add your Twitter name to all outgoing stationary e.g Invoices, Statements, Brochures etc
- Integrate Twitter feed within your main website
- Enable Share links on all service and product pages on your website
- Automatically push blog posts to social networks via API
Some of these will require a bit of technical know how. If you get stuck and need help, get in touch as we can certainly offer assistance with the technical implementation on your website.
General Etiquette
Generally, those who follow you will expect a follow back. If you choose not to follow them back intentionally, this is OK but don’t ignore followers because you are too busy to use Twitter daily! That’s not good.
Following back genuine business who you might be able to communicate with is the whole objective, so keep an eye on it and follow back those who you like the look of.
In the early stages of setting up Twitter, it can feel like a numbers game e.g get as many followers as possible as it will look good.
True, your numbers might look good quickly but what’s the point in having thousands of followers who are never likely to do business with you.
It’s a balance.
Up to 500 users, fine play the game and start to build your followers but after that, start being choosy in both who you follow and who you follow back.
The objective is to build a community of potential prospects
Self Promotional No No’s
Let’s get one thing straight right from the beginning. Whatever you do, don’t get on Twitter and start relentlessly self-promoting. Yes, this is a big part of why you are looking at using Twitter for Business but there are ways to do it and relentless end to end self-promoting posts, will never take off. Instead, try to offer something to the Twitter community and provide information that is helpful, insightful, useful and even humorous.
This is your brand exposed to the social masses so what does it say about you. Be personable, approachable and appear to offer something different to that of your competition.
Review your Competition
Take a moment to monitor what your competition is up to on Twitter to gain some ideas. Take a look at what’s working and what’s not. As above, take a peek at their followers and try and grab some prospects from there also.
Retweets
You have probably heard the term but what is a ReTweet?
This occurs when one of your followers likes what you have posted and RT (Retweets) it to their own followers. Don’t be shy about using this, as it’s fundamental to Twitter and how it works. If you like what someone says, you can Re-Tweet it BUT, don’t just roll through the list of tweets and randomly ReTweet. Make sure you have read the tweet and clicked any links which appear in the Tweet, to make sure you are happy to expose their Tweet to your audience. For example, if you ReTweet a post from a user who sells something similar to you and their Tweet links to their website and services like yours, this is clearly a bad idea and conflict of interest.
Make sure you have read the tweet and clicked any links which appear in the Tweet, to make sure you are happy to expose their Tweet to your audience. For example, if you ReTweet a post from a user who sells something similar to you and their Tweet links to their website and services like yours, this is clearly a bad idea and conflict of interest.
Tweeting
Tweeting is when you post something on Twitter. You write a small amount of text (140 characters) which can include #HashTags and URL’s along with a picture. This is where you post something to your profile and those who follow you will see it within their timeline. Whether they respond to it, click on it or re-tweet it will depend on whether they like what you have written. How you write tweets is up to you, but
How you write tweets is up to you, but personally, I have adopted a policy of writing custom tweets which aim to educate others and help them learn things they might not know. I want to be recognized for my ability to help and educate others, which in turn may get me noticed by a business who likes what I say and may need my help. I aim to write information which helps business owners in general and those in similar fields to me, may retweet my information as it also helps their clients.
Stuck for Ideas?
Yes, you definitely will be.
Most users start with Re-Tweeting but unless you come up with something unique, you won’t really stand out from the crowd, will you?
Do some research online and find out some facts which are relevant to your business, yet offer something informative to your followers.
Tools like DrumUp and Feedly help you discover fresh, trending content that you can share with your audience. DrumUp also lets you schedule posts, ensuring that your social accounts stay active even while you’re offline. Don’t rely on these permanently but they will certainly help you to get some content that will get you on the right track.
Posting Images
Let’s face it, text is necessary but a picture speaks a thousand words (so they say). A video is even better for obvious reasons. Try and post thoughtful images which get you noticed. This can be about your products, services or customers and is likely to get noticed more than just text.
Casual Self Promotion
I stated earlier and I re-iterate, it won’t do you any good to self-promote relentlessly without seeming to offer something to the masses. However, slipping the odd carefully crafted tweet into the mix with a link that puts users onto your website into a relevant area, is no bad thing. Once you are established, ask for help from followers and get them to Re-Tweet your posts for a favor or maybe a prize. Consider running a promotion which rewards users for retweeting your content.
The #HashTag
Don’t use this willy nilly or at least until you understand them. It’s simply a term which groups similar posts together via a hashtag. If you were to post 100 tweets with the hashtag #FREE they would
It’s simply a term which groups similar posts together via a hashtag. If you were to post 100 tweets with the hashtag #FREE they would become part of the hashtag FREE and your posts, along with anyone else who uses that hashtag, will appear together.
When you search for a hashtag on Twitter, there are three ways to filter the results. The “Top” option displays the most relevant and popular posts, including those from users you don’t follow. “All” shows you every tweet that uses the specific hashtag in real time, and “People you follow” will only display results from users you are following.
When you search for a hashtag on Twitter, there are three ways to filter the results. The “Top” option displays the most relevant and popular posts, including those from users you don’t follow. “All” shows you every tweet that uses the specific hashtag in real time, and “People you follow” will only display results from users you are following.
