Twitter: follow, create and engage with your followers

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009 at 9:14 am

The key strategy that any business should use to succeed on Twitter is to follow, create and engage with your followers. These three strategies can be applied to a variety of uses for Twitter. Firstly though businesses should determine a rationale for using Twitter:

Customer service

Product publicity or sales

Crisis management

Event activation

Issues advocacy

Follow

No matter what your objective is for Twitter, you should follow people talking about your brand, your rivals brands and any applicable search terms. Make good use of the advanced features of the Twitter search facility (http://search.twitter.com) or use a third party application like Tweetdeck or Hootsuite.).

Create
To make an impressive Twitter account, businesses must be crystal clear with their objectives and:

* Design a Twitter handle with a distinct personality; be sure to create similar profiles to prevent brand squatting.

* Tweet information applicable to your customers and objective.For example, product upgrades, useful tips, company information and links to online promotions.

* Consider Twitter-only promotions.

* If you have a crisis, post frequent updates distinctly describing the status of the problem and what your organisation is doing to resolve the issue.

* If you are advertizing an event, use an event specific hashtag #tweeple_adder.

In every situation if the message you want requires more than 140 characters, instead link to a blog post with a URL shortening service like tinyurl.

* Keep your tweets frequent.It has been suggested that 10-12 tweets per day is ideal but using automated services is not recommended unless you can control the frequency and quantity of tweets posted.Any “bot” which posts several updates immediately should be avoided.

* Writing interesting content and updates is important, but the power of marketing on Twitter comes from interacting and engaging with your followers.

Engage

Engagement is the secret of using Twitter successfully which can be done easily, even in 140 characters.

To engage, you should consider:

Responding to questions posted by Twitter users. This can be about products, services, events or crisis related topics.

Respond to any direct messages within an suitable timeframe. Make sure that you respond within 48 hours for a first response.

Follow up leads and try closing sales directly on Twitter.

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