Twitter for Business

I get asked a lot about social media for business, and there isn’t one right answer for all businesses. Some social media is good for some businesses, and not for others.

Is Twitter going to help your business? The best answer I have is maybe, which is understandably confusing.

How to know if you should use Twitter for your business

The most important factor for any social media, and not just Twitter, is if your customers are using it. Are your customers on Twitter? Think about your target demographic. Who are they? Where do they spend their time online? If it’s not Twitter, then you probably don’t need to be on Twitter. If your target audience is on Twitter, then it’s something to consider. Some industries just don’t use Twitter, and if that’s your industry, then don’t waste your time. If it is, then I’ll get to whether or not you should actually get on Twitter a bit later.

Does using Twitter for your business make sense? Twitter is a place to post status updates and engage in conversations. It might not make sense for your business to engage in that type of social media. Using Twitter just because other people are using it isn’t a great reason. Can you engage with your customers on Twitter? Will that engagement help your bottom line? I know Wendy’s has gotten a lot of press for their Twitter feed, but do you have the time and energy to dedicate to to that kind of online presence?

Should you use Twitter for your business?

Just because your customers are on social media and you can be on there, doesn’t mean you should. If you can’t commit to getting online, engaging with your customers, and staying active, then you shouldn’t do it. Creating a new Twitter account and slapping the icon on your website and then never logging in again will do nothing for you. In fact, it will hinder you. It says you cared just enough to create an account and nothing more.

Do you want to use Twitter to help grow your business? Here are my tips:

• Log in to Twitter every day.
• Tweet something every day. Make sure it’s relevant to your business.
• If you offer services to a specific geographic location, search for people to follow within that area.
• Search for people who are searching for what you have to offer, and respond to their tweets.
• Offer hints and tips about your business on Twitter.
• Be helpful. True story, one time an HVAC company gave me instructions on Twitter on how to light the pilot light in my heater. They weren’t local, they had no reason to help me. But they did. Had they been in my area, they would have totally earned my business.
• Share coupons and specials.
• Follow people back who follow you.
• Retweet tweets that are relevant to your business and you think might be useful for your followers.
• Be personable. People like to know real people are on the other side of the Twitter account.

Tip: Use Tweetdeck for a more useful Twitter experience. Tweetdeck is a powerful tool for managing your Twitter account(s) and one of my favorite aspects is that I can create columns based on various searches. So if I’m interested in dogs, I can create a column that only shows me tweets about dogs. That gives me a constant stream of tweets to which I can respond, favorite, or retweet as I deem fit.

Twitter can be a great asset to your business, but only if you use it.

“What about hiring a social media company to do Twitter for us?”

Can you do this? Sure. But ideally, I would hire someone to work just for you on social media, rather than a company that’s not involved in your actual business. I could tweet about various things about a lot of businesses, but I don’t know the intricacies of that business. Using people actually involved in your work would bring a lot more credibility to your business.

There are some great social media companies out there that can tweet for you and monitor your accounts, so if you want to be online and don’t have time to do it yourself, this is definitely an option.