Twitter for Small Businesses
Written by Uwe on July 10, 2012
Most small businesses nowadays use Twitter. Does your small business have a Twitter account?
No? Why not? Twitter can actually drive large amounts of sales to your company as well as potentially giving you many opportunities to engage with your clients.
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Let’s look at Twitter as a community where you need to engage and find a dialogue with everyone. Your success depends what value you bring with your tweets and how successful you are interacting with others.
There are different unwritten rules when using Twitter for personal and business purpose.
Get Started with Twitter
Firstly, when you create your business account decide if you want to have an account on your name, on your company name or any Twitter ID that is niche and people would easily find you.
For any type of account you should think what picture you will use. You can use your business logo or your own picture. It is useful to upload your own picture because in most cases people prefer to interact with a person who represents the company. Do not forget to brand your Twitter page e.g. if your company has a blue-green website layout or logo, do the same on Twitter if possible.
Before you even create your account you should think what your goals of using Twitter are. You might use Twitter to interact with current customers, to show your knowledge, to get a wider audience etc. Once you set up your goals you can start tweeting because you know what you use Twitter for. Your tweet can be anything starting from blog posts and articles and finishing with offers and discounts for you followers.
How to get followers on Twitter?
For big brands it might be easier to get followers easily but for small businesses it might be a bit more complicated. Always think about quality and not quantity. You might have 5000 followers but they might not be concerned at all what you tweet about or they are just spammers. It is useful to fill in the section called ‘Bio’ adding keywords that will help you to appear in search results. Let people know what you do. Put your Twitter profile everywhere: e-mail signatures, business cards, Facebook and LinkedIn profiles, on your website etc. As well, you can check out your competitors Twitter profiles and check out how they engage and get new followers.
Twitter Tools for Small Businesses
It is helpful to use marketing tools such as hootsuite.com and tweetdeck.com. These tools allow you to update your social media profiles such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter in one go. You can even schedule your updates for later. It saves you loads of time. There is no perfect number of how many tweets you should write a day but 1-3 updates per weekday should be fine.
So it is not that difficult to us Twitter after all. Do not forget to update your posts constantly and reply to any criticism or comments expressed by your followers. Let us know how your experience goes!
You can follow Invoiceberry at twitter.com/invoiceberry
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