Should Your Business Tweet?

“Small opportunities are often the beginning of great enterprises” –Demosthenes. At first, Twitter seems small and insignificant. So, how does Twitter lead to more business success? It isn’t enough for you to use Twitter just because others are using it.

Using it to maintain the advantage over your competition, however, is definitely a good enough reason. Numerous business owners want to leverage social media in order to get the very most out of it for their businesses even if they do not understand social media. Understanding Twitter’s potential and how it can positively affect your business is critical.

When you first start getting involved with social media, you should be careful about your expectations. Social media is an extremely powerful and effective tool for increasing your business and acquiring more and more success. However, just like anything else of value, it takes some time before you are using it to its full potential.

Twitter was established in 2006. Twitter was originally intended to be used as a fun and easy way for people to share their thoughts with other people on a global scale. Twitter became so popular, however, that it has moved way beyond its original scope.

It is no longer considered just a fun and casual way of communicating. It has also evolved into a serious, real-time network for sharing and discovering information in a business context.

People keep pursuing information and Twitter keeps feeding it to them. With Twitter’s limitation of 140 characters per tweet, all messages are concise and are communicated to others very quickly.

Many popular brands have been extremely successful using Twitter, including Dell computers and Starbucks coffee. Why do you suppose that is?

Dell and Starbucks follow the basic concepts of engaging fans.

• Dedicated resources: Twitter communicates real-time information. If you, as a business owner, receive positive or negative feedback, you need to have the ability to respond quickly in order to be deemed credible.
• Adding a Return on Investment: Dell computers routinely use Twitter to give their followers special offers and have generated a tremendous amount of sales because of Twitter. Both Dell and Starbucks really listen to their followers on ways that they can improve their products and customer service.
• Understanding the environment: When you are using Twitter, you are contributing. You are part of a community. In the Twitter environment, you are an extension of your brand. You should not expect all (or even most) of your followers to actually interact with you. You need to understand that just because some of your followers are not interacting with you does not mean that they are not listening to you.

Now, back to the original question of whether you should use social media for your brand. If you have made it part of your marketing strategy to increase the exposure of your brand online, to get people to start talking more about your brand, to generate awareness of your brand, and to learn of new ways to improve your brand and to provide better customer service, then yes, you should definitely use social media for your brand.

An extremely important aspect of Twitter and a goal that you need to try to achieve every time you use Twitter is to get people to retweet what you write. One very good way to accomplish this is by always writing good-quality content. You should always write content that is meaningful to other people.

You should also always write content that deals with subjects in which you are an expert. Write on subjects that interest you but that are also of value to your followers.

Another important and effective thing to include in your tweets is links. When people are reading tweets of interest, they will want to see links in the content so that they can easily pursue additional information. If you do include links, you should make sure to use a URL shrinking service, bearing in mind the 140-character maximum that Twitter allows.

Social media is very important to your business’s success. If you don’t incorporate social media into your business, you are doing yourself a huge disservice. Of course, this can only happen if you have the resources to dedicate to that type of marketing strategy and if you intend to make a serious commitment to leveraging social media for your business on a continual basis.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.