Introduction to Twitter for Business

Hello, and welcome to our third Social Media Blog where we will be introducing you to Twitter for Business.

Last time we talked about the excellent Professional Networking site LinkedIn.  While LinkedIn is an important Social Networking tool, on its own it is not enough.  Just as Social Networking should be one aspect of your Marketing Mix, so LinkedIn is just one aspect of your Social Networking Mix.

So here we will look at another excellent Social Networking tool – Twitter, and how twitter can help us raise awareness for ourselves, our businesses, products and services.

Why bother with twitter ?  March 2016 it was estimated that there were over 320M Twitter users, 79% outside the USA, over 16M in the UK.  So there is considerable scope for reaching prospective UK clients, associates or suppliers.

One common criticism of Twitter is the amount or trivial, ‘nonsense’, that gets tweeted.   My consistent response is not to worry about what others are tweeting – it’s what you say (tweet) that matters.   While a twitter account is free, you do need to invest your time in getting noticed.  However, twitter allows you and your business to raise your profile and brand yourselves in a very cost effective way.  And you do this by sending  tweets - that reinforce your message - basically tweeting what you believe your target audience, or community, wants to hear. 

You only have 140 characters – so word your tweets carefully, in fact statistics show that there's a sweet spot at around 120 characters.  And remember you can attache multimedia content and web addresses (URL’s) to encourage visitors to engage with your tweets, like, retweet and click through to pages in your web site, Blog, LinkedIn profile etc.  

So what should you tweet ?   

A few simple Dont's...

Avoid too many promotions and sales, we want to encourage people to follow us – don’t push them away with constant promotion and sales talk.
Don’t only talk business.  It’s called Social Media for a reason, so be social..

And some Do’s...

Do tweet about what you are doing, and make it interesting... don’t be boring.
Do tweet about your business challenges you have today, this week/quarter. Your followers will learn and understand more about you and your business.
Do tweet about what you are reading/studying/writing.  More insights into you the person.
Do tweet, announcements, press releases, product launches, blogs...
Do Educate, share knowledge an insight to your business or sector

AND - ask questions, endorse your followers by inviting input from your community (crowd sourcing)

Next... we continue broadening our Social Networking horizon and look at where Google+ fits in our Social Networking and Marketing Mix. 

Mick Holloway,
24-7 Business Networking,

twitter      - @mick_holloway