In this multi-part series on Twitter marketing for small businesses, we will be walking you through tips, advice, and best practices for getting the most out of Twitter for your business. If you will follow these simple steps, your followers and leads will increase dramatically.
What is Twitter and why should you care? We all hear about how celebrities are sharing what they’re doing and where they’re eating, but what about a business owner? What’s in it for you?
Twitter is just like any other social media environment. It’s a place to find people to connect with in your journey to turn friends into customers and customers into evangelists. You’ll be happy to know you can build an amazing community that’s engaged and responsive to you without having to share what you had for dinner last night or that you’re aching from a screaming hangover. Because so many people are talking on Twitter—it’s the most open platform (all you have to do is butt into a conversation that’s already happening)—you’ll find Twitter to be perfect for listening and learning what your target audience cares about. Forget focus groups. Twitter enables you to tap into the real-time thoughts and opinions of your customers. Because so many users on Twitter share their issues and problems, it’s also an excellent place to harvest prospects by jumping in to help prospective customers solve their problems.
Benefits of Twitter for Your Business
High Traffic: Twitter is one of the most visited websites in the United States, according to Alexa. Twitter receives more than 90 million unique visitors every single day, and that number is growing by leaps and bounds month after month. Most people access twitter from other devices, such as their mobile phones.
Efficient Micro-blogging: Twitter is a micro-blogging site where you add value and have conversations using messages that are 140 characters or less. Because of the character count limit, Twitter has become a very popular platform because it forces people to think and write with concise and crisp communication. It’s a bit like text messaging in both its brevity and its popularity. Just like texting, Twitter is popular for a couple of reasons. First, the short messages make it appealing because it can be delivered and retrieved faster than voicemail messages and emails. This means you’ll be able to participate in conversations quickly, as they happen, so you can easily expose your brand and influence decisions—but you have to move fast. The shelf life of a conversation on Twitter is literally mere seconds.
Effective Broadcast Site: The primary purpose of leveraging your visibility on Twitter is to engage in conversation and draw people to other environments where you can add more value.
Powerful Search Engine: Twitter is also a very powerful search engine that will give you insight into the social media conversation. Just as Google is a search engine that provides relevant information on a particular topic or subject when you do a search, Twitter has that same capability.
Example of a search on Twitter for Iraq.
The big difference between Twitter and Google is Twitter’s search results are in real time.
For example, at the time of this writing, Iraq is under attack from terrorist group ISIS. If you search for Iraq on Twitter, 90% of what shows up on the first page is related to the devastation of the invasion and its impact on the people of Iraq. But if you do a search for Iraq in Google, the results are pretty much about the country and only 10% to 20% of the results on the first page of Google would be about the invasion. All the other results would be related to the history of Iraq, news related to the economy of Iraq, and various other sites, such as Wikipedia. While this content is relevant, it’s not as real-time as what you receive by doing a search on Twitter.
Wide Demographic: According to Quantcast, 83% of Twitter users are age 18 or older, and the majority of those are over the age of 30. Other than LinkedIn, Twitter provides access to the largest percentage of adults. If your target audience is between the ages of 25 to 54 years old, you need to be on Twitter
Don’t be afraid of Twitter. It’s just like any other social media environment. Throughout this series, you will learn the tips and best practices that will enable you to build an amazing community that’s engaged and responsive.
