If you run a small business and aren’t using Twitter, I have to ask, why not? I can assure you that your customers are on Twitter for sure, either through the web or their Smartphone’s. Twitter is an amazing micro-blogging platform which gives business the opportunity to connect with their customers, keep an eye out on their competitors, get feedback, interact and all this can happen real time.
Few statistics to reinstate your belief in this platform and why you should leverage it:
- There are now over 500 Million users on Twitter
- 34% of marketers use Twitter to generate leads
- 208 is the average number of tweets per account
I’m sure now I have your attention, right? If you’re operating a small business, here are five reasons – why you should use twitter and incorporate it in your marketing or social media strategy without failure.
1. Your customers are talking. Are you listening?
It doesn’t matter what kind of business you are in, but some of your customers are talking about you on social media. If your consumers are writing good things about you, it becomes a testimonial and brings more positive awareness about your brand. If they are unhappy, there comes the “Twitter Rant” where they are expressing their feelings about your brand. This can cause your brand harm in a lot of ways and most importantly hamper your reputation. Thus by being socially active you can turn this situation to your benefit, by making Twitter a channel to interact with your customers directly. Where in you can provide instant solutions, which will salvage the situation and calm down your consumers.
One thing I really like about Twitter is the 140 characters restriction, so you have to be very precise with what you are talking. Moreover, if any customer is really pissed off, they also have restricted characters to bombard you :P
2. As the saying goes keep your friends close and enemies’ closer
Knowing what your competitors are doing is an important part of running a successful business. Twitter provides a great platform to do so without spending any money! Yes you heard it right. Tracking others’ performance will give you a critical business edge; just by looking at your competitors it’s possible to track new trends, and a lot of valuable information which can help you evaluate where your brand stands.
Small Tip: Create a private Twitter list or use any of these twitter tools for business; Add your competitors and key persons from their companies to that list/tool. And you can do some really interesting analysis on how they interact with their customers and what next they are coming up with.
3. Engage, Engage and Repeat
Many companies are only focussed on collecting followers on Twitter, but they forget the main part of how to retain and communicate with those followers. To spark a conversation with your followers you need to share quality content which would lead to retweets and your followers trying to engage with you. Do check our story on how to get your content go-viral.
Conversations are always two ways, so whenever you post content which evokes a response don’t leave it at. Continue communicating with your followers so it leads to building relationship with them. At the end of the day your consumers are going to buy your products, not the ‘Number of Followers.’ So whenever you long onto twitter next time, remember – Engage, Engage and Repeat.
4. Twitter Analytics
Twitter provides you with pretty extensive metrics and analytics for the performance of your tweets via its Ads dashboard. The new free analytics dashboard access allows anyone to see the performance of your Tweets. Including how many Faves, Retweets and Replies each has received, as well as letting them sort by “Best, Good or All” for at-a-glance ranking of tweet performance.
In order to be effective on Twitter, you need to be aware of what your followers are interested in? Twitter Analytics provides you a detailed list of interests and similar twitter accounts that you should follow and interact with. Once you understand your audience, you can easily plan your tweets accordingly.
5. Help from 3rd party applications
Twitter does provide analytics, so you are wondering why you need help from 3rd party applications. Causes a lot of business have multiple accounts on social media and it becomes very hectic to manage all of them. Thus there are a lot of 3rd party application tools which integrate all these platforms very conveniently in one dashboard so it gets easy to manage. Earlier I had done an article about various twitter tools available to manage your space on this platform.
Using Twitter can help you interact and engage more with your customers which may not be possible every time in real. For small businesses these relationships can foster a lot of leads, friend referrals which would work for your advantage. Whatever the motive is, be it brand management or driving traffic to website, Twitter is quickly becoming a vital component of marketing strategies.
Your Turn
How is Twitter helping your business? Are you finding it difficult to leverage this platform to its best? Share with us and we will share the best solution to it.
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