Twitter is growing at an alarming speed with over 1.2 billion Tweets recorded in January, so no matter how cynical you are about most of those tweets being what Angela ate for breakfast, you cannot ignore the potential here to promote your business online.
I’m not a huge fan of twitter for personal updates but when it comes to business, Twitter is essential. You have two options in terms of how you approach deciding on a profile, one is to create one in your companies name and the other is to create a personal profile and promote your company from there. There are examples of both below:
Profile in the Companies name
Profile in a Person's name
Whichever route you go it is important to remember the following:
- Your website URL
- What you do (short business description)
- A picture (people like knowing who they are talking to)
- Customize your profile background (this is really easy and will mean that you don’t just have one of the generic backgrounds which are boring and which people notice)
Once your profile is set up you can go ahead and start finding people who will follow you – the concept surrounding this is simple, if you follow someone they will follow you back (unless you are a huge brand which people will sign up to automatically). What I usually do is perform a quick search within Twitter for people who have mentioned the services I offer, I then go into their profiles and follow them. There are many ways of finding followers but I want to stick to the basics in this post.
The next thing you do is put the “Find me on Twitter” button on your website and any other online presence you may have. If you can, put it on all your printed paraphernalia too. This makes sure that the people who make it to your website know that they can find you in other places, opening up those channels of communication and giving people the option to choose how they interact with you. Keep in mind that there is a tipping point where people will eventually just find you and start following you, you just need to make the first step initially.
Once your profile is set up and ready to go you need to start saying something – you can’t invite people to your house and then just stand there looking at them, in the same way you can’t expect people to follow you if you don’t at least say something. There are a number of things you can talk about (all of which exclude what you had for breakfast):
- Industry news and events
- Special promotions
- Company news
- Other people doing it right
- Case studies
Try and keep the blowing of your own horn to a minimum, much like in real life people get annoyed when they go to a social gathering and one person in the group ONLY speaks about themselves and how wonderful they are – Twitter is similar in that way and if you don’t want to lose friends (in real life) or followers (on Twitter) then I’d suggest a 1 in 3 ratio on horn blowing.
When it comes to frequency you should also keep in mind that you don’t need to update your profile every hour on the hour. There is a range which is acceptable; I’d suggest anything from 3 times a day to 8 or 10 times a day depending on the industry – although the key is consistency so keep that in mind.
Twitter is here to stay so the sooner you become comfortable with it (or teach someone who has the time to interact), the better it will be for your business in the long run. There are services and platforms out there that can automate your tweets, making them easier to manage and ways in which you can use Twitter to monitor your brand online, all of which we can help you with. So go on, get your Twitter profile and start communicating with the world!
