How to Expertly Use Twitter to Grow Your Business
Are you frustrated with trying to use Twitter to grow your business?
Do you feel like you're wasting time, and not getting results?
As someone who runs my own online business, I know the feeling. But after using Twitter for the past couple years, it's now one of my favorite marketing tools.
Use Twitter to Grow Your Business
Not only is Twitter becoming a must-have marketing tool for online ventures, it's essential for offline businesses as well.
It’s the perfect place to interact one-on-one with followers and make quality connections on a personal level. I’ve seen other entrepreneurs and companies, successfully use Twitter to:
- Build brand awareness
- Drive more sales and traffic to stores or websites
- Expand their customer base
- Increase engagement
I’ve had personal experiences where I’ve landed co-author book deals, editing jobs and the chance to work with big-time entrepreneurs -- all through connections I’ve established on Twitter.
If you want to expertly leverage Twitter to grow your business, then stick around. From features, to practical strategies to online tools, these are things any business or individual should be using as part of a smart social media strategy.
1. Grow a Loyal Community in Real Time
Twitter is like a big chat room where users communicate back and forth with each other over a period of hours or days. It’s the best place to meet new contacts you hope to add to your network, versus meeting people you already know -- like on Facebook.
In my experience, Twitter is the best platform for growing a loyal community. Why? Because I’ve seen first-hand the massive potential it has to reach anyone, at anytime, for any reason.
This applies to anyone from current clients, to celebrities all the way up the to President of the United States -- in real time. And let’s not forget how it can connect you to the most up-to-date news, as well as your friends and family, when a national emergency has occurred.
Can you say that about other platforms? Not exactly. If you’re trying to expand your network, grow your community and increase awareness of your brand, then Twitter is the best social medium for you. That is, of course, if your targeted community uses Twitter.
2. Leverage Twitter's Full Potential
If you really want to use Twitter to grow your business, the biggest problem you've got to overcome is, not fully understanding how to leverage it's full potential.
For those of you who do understand it, they don’t always know how to properly harness that power to get more readers, users and customers. Because of this, many companies don’t put any time or money into learning how to leverage this platform properly.
Like most social media platforms, if you invest a little time everyday with Twitter, it can help you and your company reap tremendous rewards -- in the form of business connections, market research and even friendships.
Since my business focuses on freelancers and entrepreneurs who are building online businesses, 80% of my contacts on Twitter have morphed into well-paying gigs.
3. Create Two-Way Conversations
One of the first things you need to understand before using Twitter is who your targeted audience is. Who is your ideal customer or client? Who is your business catering to?
Twitter appeals to a much more social-media-savvy crowd, particularly younger to middle-aged professionals. But that doesn’t mean you can’t cater your conversation towards an older audience.
Once you’ve honed-in on who your business is trying to reach, then you’re able to easily locate your audience. Twitter has a built-in search and discovery tool, you can start utilizing to connect with other people within your network.
4. Gain Valuable Feedback
People want to connect with other people, not brands or logos. Twitter makes it possible to create a human-to-human connection in real time. However, the thing is you have to be willing to listen, interact and then respond when your followers are talking.
You don’t just have to wait till they respond to you in the Twitter stream, you can actively seek them out via related hashtags and search terms.
Anytime you interact or mention another brand or user on Twitter, always remember to @mention their Twitter handle. This is probably the most important rule on Twitter, but it’s definitely not utilized enough.
Have you ever tweeted to a brand and have them respond back to you using your handle? It makes you feel like a celebrity right?! (Or am I the only one?) Well, that’s how you want to make your community feel too.
5. Promote Yourself Less
It sounds counter-intuitive right? To use social media to promote yourself and your business less -- but it's true, and very effective!
Since you’re on Twitter to create a community of fans and followers around your brand, don’t forget to implement the 80/20 rule. You want 80% of your tweets to consist of other users -- and even other competitor’s -- content and RTs (retweets). Then the remaining 20% of the tweets are to be self-promotion and your own content.
No one wants to support or connect with a company who exclusively promotes themselves and their work. Everybody loves a team player!
Creating a like-minded community using Twitter isn’t difficult, it just takes a little time, patience and the ability to listen. Twitter is a massive platform that when used with common community-type courtesy, will help your business go a long way to increasing social media awareness.
