Most business people know by now that Twitter, if correctly used, is a social media platform that is very effective in reaching an audience that is wider and also more relevant. Unfortunately, most people in business have no idea how to make it work for them. They want to maximize on social media marketing, but think that by sending out some tweets and updating their Facebook status they will suddenly be making lots of money.
Unfortunately, this is a fallacy and using your social media pages this way could even lead to a damaged reputation, which will in turn ruin any chances you may have of successfully using that social media platform. Luckily, by following some of the basic principles laid out in this post you can make a success of it.
You will find that the principles laid out here will work for users who are not using Twitter for business purposes as well. We live in a society that wants immediate results, and people think that Twitter could deliver them. Of course, this is not true. What is true is that you can achieve wonderful results with Twitter as well as the other social media platforms, but you will need to put in effort and time. In the end, you will enjoy a wonderful return on this investment.
The Basic Principles
These 5 basic principles will help you to successfully use Twitter for your business:
1. The Person Reading Your Post Is Just Like You. One of the things that businesses using Twitter forget is who the audience is. As such, they end up tweeting boring tweets about their wonderful products and do not add any interesting content.
People out there are looking for added value, and without it you will be considered a spammer. The result will be that they do not purchase what you are pushing so hard to sell, they will not click on any of your links, and they may in fact simply unfollow you.
The important thing is to ensure that your timeline does not have one hundred tweets simply asking people to check out your new product along with a link. You can be sure that people will not be clicking on your links. Before you send out any tweets, put yourself in the shoes of your audience and ask yourself if you would click on such a link day after day.
2. Ensure You Do Indeed Have An audience. This is a critical point. A Twitter account with no followers is worth nothing at all, and your following needs to be serious. This is not an indicator of quantity e.g. several hundred thousand followers, it refers to the quality of your followers.
Even though people tend to get stuck on the number of followers, it is important for any business to realize that it’s not about popularity. In fact, remind yourself of this fact every morning. Even a few hundred followers, who are a quality following, are more than enough for your success. Quality followers are those who will be listening to what you are tweeting and if they find your information serious, they will in turn re-tweet it to their followers as well.
The onus is on you to make sure that your tweets are interesting enough that people actually want to retweet them. If you have one tweet that is successful, a few people will retweet it and you can find yourself reaching a good size audience. It may have taken you three months to get the same reach had you decided to advertise in the paper.
It is important to understand that on Twitter, it is possible to have many followers and find that most of them are spam accounts or bots. This is worth a lot less than having a few quality followers. The punch line then for any business that is looking to make it big on Twitter is this: As such, prior to seeing results on Twitter, you will have to put in an investment of at the very least several months of building a network.
In this time, you can tweet about what you are doing in business, however, in order to see the full effect of your efforts, you will need to have someone on the other side listening. Anybody looking for an immediate response surge may be better off sticking with the newspapers, but if you are looking to reach a wide, relevant audience and you can put in the time needed, Twitter will yield amazing results a few months down the road.
Put Yourself In Your Audience’s Shoes
Audience matters. As a business owner, you should not only put yourself in your own shoes but in your audience’s shoes too. It is crucial to view things as how your customers would view them and to think things as how your customers would think.
So, using your Twitter for your business will expand your outreach. Do you apply these basic principles with Twitter on a daily basis? Let us know what you have in mind by commenting below, or reach out to us on our Twitter.
