Twitter

Twitter effectively comprises of a stream (or ‘timeline’) of short (max. 140 characters), immediate, updates from people, companies and organisations that you’re interested in. As a result, it can be an incredibly useful business tool.

There are currently around 200 million Twitter accounts, and 95 million tweets every day.

Setting up a Twitter account takes 5 minutes. Visit http://www.twitter.com and be sure to choose a suitable user name, add a description of your business and your website address. Add a logo or photograph to the picture section.

Industry & Competitor News

When starting a new Twitter account, use the search function to look for as many relevant people and businesses as you can.   They can be industry news sources, customers, potential customers, competitors and suppliers. It can be worthwhile searching for some competitors early on and researching how they use Twitter, who they follow, and who follows them.

It can sometimes be more efficient just to type in the name of the company/person you’re looking for into google and append “on twitter” to the search.

For every interesting Twitter account you find, click the ‘follow’ button. The accounts you choose to follow will form part of your Twitter news feed, so as you build the list of people you follow, you’ll be building a very defined, personalised source of news.

If you find yourself looking for inspiration on whom to follow, find an industry news Twitter account and check who else follows it by clicking on the ‘followers’ link. You can see the accounts that the account itself follows by clicking on ‘following’. This approach can be followed for any account and should allow you to build a comprehensive list of relevant people and organisations to follow.

In this early stage, try to follow as many other relevant accounts as you can find – it’s easy to ‘unfollow’ them later if you wish to, and hopefully some of them will follow you back and start to build an audience for your future ‘tweets’. On the other hand, don’t follow anyone that is unlikely to be of interest – you’ll be diluting the usefulness of your carefully personalised news feed.

Raising Awareness

Every time you follow an account, they’ll receive an email notification that you’ve done so, and may check out your Twitter profile, follow you back, or visit your site, especially if your business is of interest to them.

Showing Authority and Knowledge

Once you’re following a reasonable amount of Twitter accounts, you’ll see that the collected tweets on your home page have become a constantly up to date source of information about your industry, local market, competitors, suppliers and anything else you’re interested in.

You can use this knowledge to stay on top of developments and opportunities in your market, inspire discussion in relevant forums etc. and provide fodder for a news or blog section on your site.

You can reply directly to any tweet, publicly or privately, and you can also ‘retweet’ something that one of the people you follow has tweeted. Retweeting (RT) is effectively taking a tweet from someone you follow and tweeting it to everyone who follows you. When you do so, the original tweeter will get a notification that you’ve done so, in effect helping them market their business, and hopefully gaining you some goodwill.

Once you have some followers of your own (built through people following you back, or via other marketing methods) you’ll be able to keep them up to date with your own tweets.

Regular tweeting will help you build authority on a topic, and can also help you drive traffic to a particular area of your website – e.g. “Just updated our news page with this story – please read and let us know what you think – *link*”

You can use Twitter to announce promotions, or use it as a promotional tool itself – “retweet this to be entered into a draw” style promotions are great for increasing visibility, growing interest in your company and gaining new followers.

Mentions of your company or products

You’re able to search Twitter for keywords too – try typing your business name into the search bar and see if anyone has mentioned you recently. Many companies use this feature for customer insight, customer service, sales leads, feedback and testimonials. Tools such as Tweetdeck can help you stay abreast of any mentions you might have - download and try Tweetdeck out here.

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