When I go to business networking events, many new users of Twitter are constantly asking me how they can use the site more effectively for social networking and promoting their business.
I tell them some companies use twitter to check up on competitors or find new businesses and customers with to network with. Furthermore, twitter is a great opportunity to promote various kinds of products and services – as long as you don’t go overboard.
Twitter Benefits
It does take work to develop a list of quality followers, but it is worth the work to interact with your target market in a whole new way.
Once you sign up and become a Twitter member, don’t blurt out about your business at first. Just be observant and see what others are doing.
If you find people that will be useful to your business, you can follow them and start building those all important online relationships.
By doing so, you can get vital information on how to promote your business using Twitter. Through observation, you will know what you’re capable of doing; you will know your weaknesses and strengths.
Taking on the Twitter Challenge
It is really challenging to promote your business with only 140-character tweets. The social community in Twitter is quite large and they come from diverse backgrounds and interests.
After you’ve done the observing and you feel comfortable, you can start interacting.
By exchanging ideas, questions, and answers, you can establish good relationships. Who knows… perhaps you can also generate helpful information from them.
Building relationships is important. Listening to what others have to say is also essential; it’s one way of making them feel that they are important. When you feel valued, you can easily give your trust and when someone trusts you, you can easily persuade them to check out business website.
Many groups succeed in Twitter because they join forces and work together to promote each other’s products or services. If you think you can’t make it on your own, join a group. This is the good thing about Twitter because many individuals can engage in communication simultaneously. It’s an effective way of communicating with each other and sharing great ideas.
There are often posts on www.linkedin.com that ask people in certain industries to post up their twitter username so like-minded individuals can follow eachother.
The tweets should be updated regularly – don’t set up an account, then leave it to collect dust – one tweet a day is ok when you’re starting out.
Try to write something more interesting other than your day-to-day business. Perhaps there is a news article in your industry that is worth mentioning. Are you attending a conference or exhibition that is being tweeted about?
Some Words of Encouragement and Caution
Determine your followers needs and wants.
Millions of people use Twitter everyday. If you can tap into just a small percentage of these users, you can make a lot of friends and probably promote a business. Just be careful. Twitter success is ensured only if you know how to use the site properly – otherwise you can come across as a spammer.
The reason why so many individuals fail in Twitter is because they tend to promote their business more rather than giving more attention to the needs of the market. Studying the market is imperative if you want any kind of business to succeed. Listen to the feedbacks of your friends and prospects.
Check out some of my tweets and see how often I promote my site and products – you will see I seldom do a promotion about my products or consultancy services – I use twitter to build relationships.
Once you get a sense of what your followers are looking for, you will know what to do.
Get the messages right and its easy to keep people informed about your business and enable you to create unique and interesting microblogs so followers will know what you’re up to and they can easily feel if you’re sincere and true to your words. Twitter is a great way to build online crediblity.
Comments on this entry are closed.