If you own a business or you’re a marketer desperately looking for new and improved “ready to act” clients. If you’re an advertising agency, a Web designer, or own a retail store, and you’re looking for a proven instant communication vehicle online, then using Twitter should be your solution.
The traditional riddle for all business owners has been how they can immediately locate and then communicate with these “money in hand” consumers or clients, and to do so as quickly and inexpensively as possible.
So flash forward to today in the world of instant gratification that we all live in. Twitter, still an odd sounding if not a ridiculous name to many, recently revealed that they were valued at over $8 billion dollars, and currently serving over 100 million users. There’s an estimated 50 million who log into and send, receive, read or retweet on a daily basis.
These users are sending over 250 million or so tweets a day, covering absolutely every topic, including yours, that’s relevant today. Facebook is also now allowing their massive database of users to be able to update their Twitter accounts directly from their Facebook profiles, which adds more usage.
The number of these precise micro messages which are sent from these daily users on a daily basis represents potentially missed business opportunities for you, if you’re not on Twitter or happen to be using it improperly.
The good news is that getting on Twitter is free and easy. So if you own a business, it may be a good idea to create your own “branded” company Twitter profile, using your corporate identity as the background theme.
You should also be using your existing company logo, or display a current photo to use as your avatar. This picture will appear directly left and near the top of every tweet that you post.
Finding Twitter Followers Who May Potentially Be Clients
Say that you’re a local real estate agent. If you just continuously add people at random who are interested in houses or property, you will more than likely just round up a group of other real estate agents, your direct competition, which you wouldn’t want and will be useless to you.
Instead, you would want followers, potential house buying clients, who are interested in or about to enter the real estate market. They’re contemplating on purchasing a home in your area. So what you need to do is go where these people are.
You should be searching for those Twitter users who are in your local area and has displayed similar interests or hobbies as you, who are also close to your own demographic profile.
If you happen to sell condominiums, then begin by adding a few followers everyday who appears to be up and coming young urban professionals. If you happen to sell larger homes, look more for mom or dads who are local bloggers and add them. This method may be a little time consuming, but it will produce better potential clients than just netting a few non relevant followers.
Using Twitter As A Business Tool Properly
The majority of corporations or business individuals will get on Twitter and tweet absolutely boring or useless information, such as, corporate news, your latest company donations that you’ve made, or links to a recent press release etc. This is admiral on your behalf, but this type of information doesn’t benefit your followers in any way. If they’re looking for that type of news, they would just go to your website or blog.
While there’s obviously room and time on Twitter for these types of posts, so that you can connect with them or just to fill the void, but if this is all what your company tweets about, then the potential “money in hand” clients will just ignore your Twitter account.
Keep in mind that Twitter is an extremely powerful two-way channel of instantly communicating you, your brand or your business and instantly offering what you have to offer, all in real time. It’s not just a one-way advertising channel like a newspaper ad.
You’ll need to make sure that you are directly interacting with your Twitter followers rather than just placing your sales links out there. So it may be a good idea to just appoint someone in your company to strictly manage your Twitter account, and ensure that they follow up on all of the inquiries as well as the service requests.
Make sure that you inspect your core demographic. If they happen to be seniors, they’ll most likely enjoy links to articles regarding better health or fighting identity theft. If they happen to be young adults, provide links to relevant “cool” YouTube videos.
Setting Up A Schedule For Your Tweets
By using a service like HootSuite allows multiple users to simultaneously log into a single Twitter account from virtually anywhere there’s an Internet connection, to manage its content.
You’re able to schedule all of your tweets which requires just a few moments every day. You can set it up in the morning and line up your scheduled tweets for the remainder of the day.
You’re also able to set up your Twitter account so that it will automatically email you whenever someone happens to mention you, your company or your brand from anywhere on Twitter’s universe, even when anyone happens to ask a question. This allows your appointed staff to immediately reply to the request or query without having to constantly monitor the service.
If you haven’t really participated in what Twitter has to offer, just take a look at their astonishing numbers of usage and then examine if you’re able to devote just a small fraction of your time and effort to start up your own Twitter account.