How to use Twitter
As a business owner we do not care what other people eat for breakfast. Twitter can be very noisy with irrelevant topics. How can you really use Twitter to get results?
Twitter Followers
If you have no Followers then no one will see you messages!
How To Get Followers
You don’t want just anybody – you want people in your target market to follow you. One of the best ways to get the right kind of followers is to follow them first. Most people will follow back! If you are a local business do a search on Twitter for other people that live in your city. If you know that you are looking for other business owners (you are a B2B business) then look for other local businesses on Twitter. If your target market are Gardeners then search for gardeners on Twitter. Find the people that are going to CARE about what you have to say.
Once you have targeted people following you – look at their followers and you will usually find a gold mine of people to follow (who will likely follow you back). Spend some time building up your Followers. This might be a project for an employee, the marketing department, or spouse.
Twitter Messages
Twitter messages are short – only 140 charters. Consider what your followers would like to hear from you – make your messages short but interesting. Word them to elicit responses and ReTweets! Retweets are when a Follower re-posts your same message to their Followers. It is what you want to have happen.
Put links into your Tweets. Get people more engaged in your other online content – blog posts, articles, and your website. You can tell how many people click your links by either using a shorten service like Bit.ly or having analytics connected to your website and analyzing your inbound traffic.
Twitter Benefits
Twitter has many benefits:
- Engaging your audience
- Creating a Following
- Driving traffic to your other web properties
- Getting blog posts indexed instantly
- Finding people with your same interests
- Creating online relationships
- Building your business
Twitter is worth learning – to ignore it is to do damage to your online business. Twitter is not going away!
