Twitter – Four Top Tips
Next up in this blog series is Twitter. Twitter can be used as an effective marketing tool through helping interaction with an online community. Twitter can help you maintain constant engagement online with your existing customers while helping you find new ones. The following are four top tips for using Twitter as a successful marketing tool.
Top Tip 1: Use Hootsuite
Many businesses are still using Twitter.com to manage their Twitter profile, which has limited functionality compared to using social media client applications. The one we recommend is Hootsuite as this is browser based (allowing access anywhere where there is an internet connection) and has several features to enhance using Twitter. The other tool commonly used is Tweetdeck. However this is installed onto the computer itself so cannot be accessed elsewhere and doesn’t have as much as functionality at Hootsuite.
There are two key functions we like in Hootsuite. The first allows you to add other social media accounts like Facebook Fan page and LinkedIN to your Hootsuite account, allowing you to post a message to Twitter and other platforms too. This can be a great time saver. The second is the Mentions and Direct Message columns. This allows you to see at a quick glance if there are key messages you need to respond to – ideal if you don’t have the time to check your home feed that day.
Top Tip 2: Schedule Messages
You’ve been out all day and have a key message to post but it’s the evening and your audience is less likely to be online. Using Hootsuite you can schedule the message to go out the next day when your audience is more likely to be online. Again, this can be used not only for Twitter, but also for Facebook Fan pages and LinkedIn.
Top Tip 3: Keyword Searches
Like searching in a search engine, you can search in Twitter. This can be a way to find appropriate messages to respond to in order to promote your business. It can also be used for research if you want to track messages containing useful information and articles about your industry. This can be done in Twitter.com but again Hootsuite allows much more functionality and control over this. You can set up several keyword searches and quickly seeing the results in column streams. We know of one business that used searches on Twitter to find people who wanted quotes for the type of services that they offer. By providing quotes in this way, the business acquired a new client they wouldn’t have found otherwise.
Top Tip 4: Build Your Following
Our final top tip is to build your following using Twitter directories There are several available so we’ll just mention two. The first is a free one, Twellow, known as the Yellow Pages of Twitter. Here you can find Twitter profiles to follow by location or industry category. This way you are following Twitter profiles in your target market and the intention is that they will follow you back (this cannot be guaranteed as the action is dependent on them reciprocating). The second one is Tweetadder, which is a paid-for tool where you can automatically follow profiles based on automated keyword searches. This tool can also automatically un-follow those that do not follow back after a few days so that your ratio of followed to followers doesn’t become too disproportionate.
We hope you find these top tips useful. For more top tips follow us on Twitter at @cwitservices.
Thanks
Chris
CW IT Services
Tags: Facebook fan page, hootsuite, inbound marketing, linkedin, social marketing, social media, tweetadder, twellow, twellowhood, twitter
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