Twitter for Business
What It Is
With over 125 million users worldwide and growing, Twitter is one of the most popular social media channels, and possibly the easiest to use, too. If you can text, you can tweet. On the Twitter website (http://www.twitter.com/), through a smartphone app, or via text message from a registered phone, users post 140-character messages, or “tweets,” that are visible to other Twitter users who are following the account or anyone looking at the user’s Twitter profile.
What It Does
At its core, Twitter is a content-sharing service; in the early days it was referred to as “microblogging.” This means Twitter can be used for outbound business marketing and promotion in all the ways blogging or email marketing can:
- customer service
- PR
- HR and recruiting
- building personal relationships with customers
- encouraging fans to share your content and driving site or blog traffic by sharing links.
And because tweets are indexed by the search engines, they contribute to inbound marketing and SEO as well.
Who It’s For
Almost everybody. Because there are so many ways to use Twitter (see above) and because the barrier to entry is so low (just a few minutes a day), it’s hard to think of many industries where Twitter couldn’t be used for business marketing. Visit the Twitter Case Studies page to see ways other businesses are using Twitter for social media marketing.
Here are additional resources on using Twitter for your business’s social media marketing.
How To Use It
PowerUp Recommends
Case Studies
Resources
- Twitter for Business: 5 Step Starter Kit - CDG Interactive blog
- CDG’s Social Media bookmarks on Delicious
- Twitter for Business section on twitter.com
What You Need to Know About Twitter
Our 3 Likes
- It’s easy to set up and easy to use.
- You have direct access to interact with experts and other interesting people from all over the world.
- It’s adaptable and can be used for a variety of marketing goals and types of businesses.
Our 3 Dislikes
- It’s difficult to find and follow related conversations.
- Information flows so quickly, it can easily get lost.
- Follower management is cumbersome and manual.
3 Things to Do Now
- Set up an account, if you haven’t already.
- Assign one person (or a team) to spend 5-15 minutes on Twitter daily.
- Decide which URL shortening service you’ll use for adding links.
Social Media Pyramid
Your Recommended Allowance of Social Media
Consult the Social Media Pyramid to find out which social media channels you should be using, and how much time you should be spending on each.