Five ways to use twitter in business
Twitter is central to any social media strategy. It’s a key channel for driving traffic to your website and can promote your expertise, knowledge and product. ConstructaQuote brings you five ways business can use twitter in their social media strategy.
1. Use Twitter to build your reputation as an expert –Twitter gives control over a never ending stream of information. The more specialised you are the more followers you gain. Specialising creates an opportunity to build reputation. If you want to become an expert keep your tweets focused, deliver value by sharing knowledge and link back to your own website.
2. Use Twitter to gain high speed business intelligence –Twitter’s advantages over other media are that it’s instant, bypasses email and is mobile. In business, decisions, events and information can be tweeted as they happen. This speed puts a good twitter stream with reliable sources ahead of any industry publication. Social media strategy focuses on inbound traffic, but don’t ignore the value of a good Twitter feed for your own business intelligence.
3. Use Twitter to power your internal communications –you don’t need an intranet anymore; Twitter is a platform to communicate with your staff. Use Twitter for distribution of information, updates, pictures and links direct to your team. Be aware direct messages to individuals (@employee) can be seen in the account’s timeline. You can use Twitter to run a meeting – see #twitterchat below. And if you use a cloud based fileshare like google apps, or drop box tweet file urls to keep everyone up to speed on projects.
4. Use Twitter to search for specific information using #hashtags. The # symbol after a word or phrase makes it searchable by Twitter. Put your keyword with a hashtag (#) infront into the search box and see what’s been tweeted about it. If you want people to find tweets by keyword, use #hashtags. Using the hashtag #in sends your tweet directly into your LinkedIn status update.
5. Use Twitter to host discussions in a #twitterchat - tweets are broadcast in real time so you can use Twitter to get people together for a chat. Set a time and a subject and agree the meeting’s #hashtag. Participants log in and search for the #hashtag – then start tweeting. Best discussions are limited to a few key topics.
New to Twitter – or just don’t get it?
It’s a free microblogging service that allows you to send short messages or tweets – only 140 characters long – to your ‘followers’, people who want to get your messages. As well as sending messages, you receive messages from the people you follow. Tweets are listed - most recent first - in your twitter home page, or choose to send and receive tweets directly in your phone. You get to choose who you follow but have to work a bit harder to get people to follow you. Twitter is central to any social media strategy as it enables direct access to followers, interaction in real time as well as promotional activity. If you haven’t got a Twitter account, go to www.twitter.com and register. With an estimated 225 million twitter members (March 2011) you’ll have to deploy more creativity than an X-factor hopeful to get a twitter username that hasn’t got a smattering of numerals.