What do you use Twitter for or believe other people use it for? Is it simply to send out your thoughts into the world, whatever they may be? For social movements started with simple hashtags? Or the many feuds and spats you see between famous people? Maybe you simply use it to follow the lives and thoughts of people you know and like. However, one aspect you may not have thought about or believed you could do was use Twitter for business.
Seems like too far-fetched an idea, doesn’t it? How can you use Twitter for business when it’s just a social media website that even restricts your posts to 140 characters? But, if you think about it, advertising is all about being able to reach your audience. With more than 300 million active monthly users, Twitter has a huge audience. Hence, it makes sense to tap into this resource. Making Twitter one of the tools in your business strategy can help your brand grow beyond imagination.
More than reaching out to the audience, being on social media is now expected of businesses. If your audience or customers can’t reach or discover you on social media websites, you may lose your credibility. Now, having social media presence is like having a phone number, an email address and your own website; you just can’t do without it in this day and age. So, if you too want to use Twitter for business and wondering how to get started, we have the basics right here for you.
Start with Research
The first thing you can do with Twitter is use it for research. This research can be three-fold. First, you can keep an eye on the industry you’re a part of; see what’s new and where the industry is moving towards. This can help you plan your own future endeavors to keep up with the changing times. Secondly, you can also see what your competitors are doing. This information is invaluable to businesses, especially those that are just starting out. You can learn from not only your competitor’s successes, but also their mistakes; you can figure out what to do and not to do without having to experiment a lot yourself.
Finally, and the most important, is the ability to research the market you will be working and selling your products or services in. How? Through demographic and market research among the people who follow you or your competitors. You can see their likes, their dislikes, what they talk about and what they think of specific products or services; a lot of people share all this information with the world through Twitter and businesses can use it without any ethical violations.
Interact with Your Customers
The people on Twitter aren’t just a mere resource that you can use; they’re actual people who make the decisions of whether a business succeeds or fails. A lot of companies not only realize this essential fact, but capitalize on it as well. This is the reason behind having good customer support centers and making sure the customers feel heard and important at all times. While this process used to be really slow where people had to write letters to the company and wait weeks for a reply, it has gotten faster over the years.
First came the option of phoning in with your question or complaint, then you could send it via email, and now websites like Twitter. People don’t like to wait when there are pressing concerns, like questions about a new product they have bought or want to buy. They especially don’t like to wait when there is a complaint to be made. So, giving them an outlet where they can convey their concerns instantly is one of the best customer support ideas of this century. Regardless of whether or not they receive a reply instantly, the customers can have some comfort in knowing that they have an option to make their voice heard. It also gives companies an opportunity to stay on top of things and take care of problems as soon as they arise.
Advertise Your Business
All businesses know that the one thing they need to reach out to their customers is advertisements. Think what you will of the advertising agencies, the tactics they use, the controversies that surround them, but advertisement is the basic tool a business has for selling its product or service. It the people who are going to buy the products or avail the services or a company don’t know about them, how do the companies get anything done? They don’t. Then again, how can Twitter be used to advertise your brand?
Firstly, as we keep mentioning, Twitter has a huge audience. If you manage to get enough followers and tweet out about your product or service, it will reach every single one of them. They may retweet your tweet, thereby increasing the audience of your original tweet. Tweeting and retweeting is the “word-of-mouth” of Twitter; the more you use this to your advantage, the bigger your business can grow.
Another method you can experiment with, when you use Twitter for business, is hashtags. If you can get your hashtag to trend, this will increase your audience beyond imagination. To get a hashtag to trend, you have to be really crafty; the hashtag has to be unique, creative, thought-provoking, eye-catching, relevant, and so much more. This may seem like a lot of work, but it is definitely worth it. If you can’t put in the effort needed, you could always use an already trending hashtag and target your advertising to that hashtag. This will increase audience to your post, as well as your page and website.
Use Twitter Analytics
Can a business be stagnant and survive? No. A business or company has to change with the times and with the attitudes of people in that time. How does one go about doing that? You start by finding out how the times and people have changed, and what change they want in your company. However, you can’t go around asking every customer in person, can you? That is where surveys and focus groups often come in; they streamline the process of customer feedback. Another way to see what your customers are thinking is by going directly to the source. How do you do that through Twitter? By using the Twitter Analytics. Stemming from the concept of research, the analytics tool on all Twitter posts is an amazing option when it comes to figuring out what your customers want.
Using the analytics tab, businesses can see how well their tweets are performing with their customers; they can see the number of likes or retweets they have gotten. This allows them to figure out which tweet has made an impression on the followers and which has failed to garner attention. Knowing that can help a business come up with a strategy that makes an “impression” on as many of its followers as possible. Analytics can also be used to check which of the hashtags people have interacted with the most and who influences the Twitter page in general. All this information can then allow businesses to formulate marketing and advertising strategies.
Get People Interested with Giveaways
What do people really love and can’t say no to? Free stuff. We all love a little something extra, something free that comes with no strings attached. A company that offers free stuff every once in a while goes a long way in making a good impression on its customers. This free stuff is obviously accompanied by a competition that the people have to be a part of and win. And once these people are interested in the giveaway and the competition, where do those lead? Directly to the company organizing that particular giveaway. It’s the modern form of the tried and tested “bait and hook” strategy businesses often employ.
However, you must be careful when you use a competition or giveaway to lure audience to your business. The giveaway or prize has to be something that will interest the audience; if they’re not interested and don’t care about winning the prize, no one will participate. Once you have a good prize or giveaway, you have to think about the competition itself. Again, the competition or the task that gets you a prize or a giveaway must be interesting enough to make the people be a part of it. No one will want to be a part of something boring, so you must interest your audience from start to finish.
If, and only if, your audience is interested, they will eventually find their way to your page and your business. However, you can help this along as well. You could set up the competition or the giveaway in such a way that the people entering have to follow you, or like your page, or visit your website. Furthermore, you can give away your own products as the prize or giveaway to introduce them to a larger audience. So, if people don’t register or win, they will still get to see your products and may get interested.
These are just some of the many tips and tricks you can utilize if and when you decide to use Twitter for business. Use these and see your business grow beyond expectations.
Michelle 
Adeline