What is Twitter? Part 4: Twitter for Small Business

Provided in the section are tips on Strategy, Free Twitter Applications to help control, track and organise your Twitter presence along with best practise advice.

Is Twitter Right For Your Business?

Dave only tried to sell on Twitter. Wanting offers, good customer service and event information Jane decided not to follow Dave.

From the start a business has to realise that by solely posting information based on their products and nothing else, will not enhance their reputation on this social networking site.

The key is building customer relationships, a two way conversation and discussion, and a more personal approach.

This personal approach does include Marketing products but also reacting to questions, complaints and generally being more helpful.

Can you afford not to use Twitter?

Do your competitors have a Twitter account?

If someone complained about your product and needed advice would the competitor talk to your customer and explain the benefits of their product. If the customer was using your product incorrectly who would explain the solution?

Do your competitors advertise events on Twitter?  Are they getting new customers from Twitter by interacting with them?

Twitter Terms of Service

Twitter was not intended to be a business marketing tool, it is a social networking community and it pays to look at the Twitter terms of service before starting an account. It would be very annoying and a waste of time and effort to be banned from Twitter a few months down the line for breaking their terms.
View the Top 40 companies using Twitter to get an idea of how companies are using Twitter.

Create a Twitter Account

Create your company account hopefully with the exact name if it isn’t taken. Then create a list of the employees who will use this account and place the list into the lists on your Twitter page. If you prefer employees can use their personal accounts or have an account with the company name and their initials.

It would also be helpful to customers to add a list of all the employees using Twitter on the main company website see Mashables Twitter employee list. By following the staff at a company, this would allow potential customers to know what type of people work there.

Twitter Marketing Strategy

What areas does your company need to focus on when considering how to use Twitter?  Twitter can be used for:

• Customer Service/Support see best buys Twelpforce
• Promote Events/Competitions
• Market Research
• Product Marketing
• Company News Channel

As a business you will need to produce a Best Practise Social Media Policy for your organisation and decide who is best qualified and equipped to represent the company on Twitter.

• Is there a representative from each department?
• Who will monitor and react to queries, requests, complaints?
• Will the CEO have an account?
• In a large organisation can employees interact?

Depending on the size of the organisation, their budget/resources and the organisations goals will dictate the strategy.

Create your Company Account and Create Your Network

After creating your Company account on Twitter it is very important to personalise the account with the company brand and employee details (see What is Twitter? Part 2: How do you Twitter for details).

For a personal Twitter account it would be good to have quality updates coming to your account.  For a business Twitter account the goal is to expand the amount of people who will hear your message.  To do this you will need to follow people using:

• search through your existing contacts, when joining Twitter you have the option to search on Twitter for people you know and you can also e-mail invites.
• look for speakers, professionals, thought leaders, successful people from your industry by using the search facilty to add their names or industry keywords.
• Follow the competition see who they are following and see what they have to say.

Discuss and Talk to your Network

Once you have a certain amount of followers begin to talk to people. Search through the traffic using tools such as Monitter.com, Twitterfall.com, or more advanced tools such as TweetDeck.com and Hootsuite.com. With these tools you can search for your keywords and watch what is being discussed about your brand/products online.

• If someone is saying good things about your brand add the tweets to a favourite list on your company page.  Other users have access to these comments and they will have the same effect as an impartial review.
• If someone is saying negative things reply to that person and try to rectify the situation.  You will gain a reputation for your customer service.
• Create decent and valuable interesting content that followers can use, maybe an article regarding their purchase, an offer, a competition, links to free e-books etc.
• Advertise your events, upload event photos, and videos.
• Use the hash tag feature if you want to follow the success of your output.

Tracking your Twitter Company Account:

It is very import to track and analyse your Twitter account. When beginning your Twitter account, using a service such as TeetDeck, Twhirl, Tweet Co or Hootsuite is imperative.  These applications can:

• incorporate lots of other applications
• manage more than one Twitter user
• help you analyse and moniter the community
• help you analyse your own account
• use short url services
• add other media photos, music, media
• manage other social networks e.g. Facebook, Linkin, etc
• offer many more services and best of all they are free!

Additional tools include:

• Google Analytics where you can measure the amount of referrals from Twitter against timelines.
• Ranking tools include Twitterholic.com, Twitter.grader.com, Twitterank.com
• Media Tools – Twitpic, Brizzly
• Statistic Tools – Tweetstats.com
• Support – help.twitter.com, twitter.pbwiki.com

There are an incredible amount of applications and methods to help you with your Twitter experience I have included more helpful info and links at Twitter tools.

The final section of this series is possibly the most important – Twitter Safety Tips, here I cover some basics do’s and don’ts when using Twitter.

To finish off here is a How Not to Build your Twitter Community you may wish to view!