Innovative Ways to Use Twitter for Business

As you are probably aware, Twitter is a very powerful social media tool for business. If you feel that Twitter was working but isn’t anymore, you can refresh how you use it with new and innovative ideas and tips.

There are many different ways that you can change your approach to Twitter for your business and you will be surprised about how many new tricks and tips have been introduced over the last year. You will find many of the tip valuable and you will be able to apply them to your business practices with positive results. However, there may also be some tips that don’t work for your business. You should glean what you can and discard the rest.

Using lists

The people whom you follow on Twitter and the people who follow you are very important when it comes to using Twitter for business. When you use Twitter for business, you should have a strong list of people who are necessary for you from a business perspective. Over time, the number of people on your list will grow and some of the people who were on your list for a long time may drop off. When you add a new person to one of your lists, you can let other people understand that person’s value as well. It is a way of giving back. Just like any other type of relationship, Twitter business relationships don’t always last forever. Some of them are with you for a finite amount of time and others are with you indefinitely. It is very important that you realize that the larger your list of Twitter connections, the more difficult it will be to extract what is important among all of the tweets that you are involved with.  One way to make sure that you don’t miss anything is by make lists and making sure that those lists are continually being updated.

Lists are very important for your business and many people don’t realize how helpful they are. They are truly underused by many people. You not only have the ability to create lists on Twitter but you can create up to 20 lists (each list has the capacity of containing 500 names). You can categorize them in whichever way you see fit so that the lists work best for you. Some of your lists may include:

• People in your niche
• Clients
• Influencers
• People in professional organizations connected to you and your business

If you create lists, it will enable you to concentrate specifically on what people are saying to you and then you can decide if you want to deepen the relationship that you share with them. You can also monitor each of your lists using Twitter.com or a tool such as HootSuite. Remember that you are not under any obligation to put everyone on one or more of your lists. It is a very good idea to be discriminating when it comes to building your lists.

Building a list that relates to conversations

 Your Twitter experience will depend largely on the specific people whom you follow. A large part of your experiences on Twitter will be positive ones; however, some of them may not be so positive. If the people whom you follow are inspirational to you as well as influencing you in other positive ways, it will be a wonderful experience. A great way to cultivate this is by creating a list that only contains people with whom you have private conversations. Your list should include:

• People who are inspirational to you in your business
• People who are inspirational to you personally
• People with whom you enjoy speaking

Inspiration can come from may different places in your work and in your life. Because you are creating a private list, you are the only person who will have control over that list. You can choose to share your list with other people but you are the only person who can choose to do that. It is important to remember, however, that once you revise your list, it will be seen by other people so discretion is still important.

Refresh your profile photo

Your profile photo will show up to each and every one of your tweets. It is a golden opportunity for you to make sure that your image is the most effective that it can be and you get to control the image that people will associate with you, over and over again. It is rather like a subliminal message. The only difficult thing is that your photo, although it appears frequently if you tweet frequently, is very small and perhaps not very easy to see.

Revise your visual branding

You can customize and revise the look and feel of your Twitter profile page at will. In other words, you can add new and important informaiton to your page whenever necessary. Additionally, you can create a customized graphic as well, which will be aesthetically pleasing.

Revamp your Twitter biography

You should reevaluate your biography and make sure that it communicates to people what you do, how you can solve their problems and some excitement. It is a good idea to try to read your biography as though you have never seen it before. It will be very effective if you are able to inject some of your passion into your biography.

Refresh your strategy

Automation is a great thing; however, too much automation may not be so great. The human touch is very necessary. After all, you are relating to people and they absolutely will appreciate your taking the time to reach out to them on a personal, emotional level.

Conclusion

There are many different ways to refresh your Twitter efforts. Those discussed here are just a few of them. Over time, more will be revealed. Remember that you should use whichever tips you feel will be beneficial to your business and disregard the rest. Whichever pieces of advice you feel are helpful will bring you that much closer to bringing your business to the next level.

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