If you are not definite whether Twitter supplants soap operas as a time sink or offers you some of your best opportunities to build relationships with customers & enhance your company's brand identity, the answer may not surprise you. Like any promotion medium, or any medium that can be used for promotion, Twitter offers you results commensurate with how thoughtfully you approach it & how wholeheartedly you engage in it. Look past its non-traditional exterior to see Twitter's actual ability to connect people in ways that can transform your company a tiny bit at a time
1 Remember that success on Twitter can build slowly, and that trying to hurry it by purchasing followers or using shady shortcuts doesn't work. As SocialMediaToday points out in a case study of hardball promotion run amok, "There is no magic pill, magic ticket or free ride to success in social media and business."
2 Be yourself. That means things on Twitter. First, make your tweets sound like the cohesive voice of your business. If you are tiny, capitalize on your identity as a one- or two-person business and equate your size with a focus on treating customers like individuals. Second, even if you are bigger than a sole proprietorship, assign person who is nice at communicating your authentic value as a business to be your official and singular voice on the service. Keeping your participation actual goes a long way toward attracting followers. As Twitter itself suggests, "Share images and behind the scenes knowledge about your business. Even better, give a glimpse of developing projects and events. Users come to Twitter to get and share the latest, so give it to them!"
3 Balance overt attempts to attract customers with tweets that convey your company's character without making an obvious commercial pitch. When you do post a discount offer or a special sales event, your followers pay greater attention to it because you are not always explicitly soliciting their business.
4 Use your Twitter presence to collect over customers. You can share insights with fellow business people, and even find opportunities to barter services, collaborate on a project with community implications, build a network of like-minded entrepreneurs or learn from veteran business owners. Use mentions and following strategically to build a position of authority in your field. Twitter recommends that you "Reference articles and links about the bigger picture as it relates to your business."
5 Think two times about following everyone who follows you. If you are using your Twitter timeline as a place to rub elbows with customers and suppliers, trying to keep up with a long list of people you followed only as a thank you turns your tweet stream in to a raging river of who-can-read-all-that. In case you do choose to follow back routinely, define whom you'll follow and whom you won't on the basis of attributes you can discern basically, then generate original, non-automated thank-you responses in keeping along with your focus on authenticity. As Mashable points out in an essay on the American Express OPEN Forum, "If you do choose to follow everyone, authenticity is key. Your followers will be able to tell whether they are speaking to a robot or a person and a actual person is always more valuable on Twitter."
6 New Twitter followers of the charitable sites trigger additional kibble donations, as do new followers of the Halo corporate Twitter account. Followers see discounts on pet food, previews of the every day trivia questions, and other informational and commercial tweets. The relationship unifies congruent organizations in an endeavor that is consistent with both their goals, and gives the commercial enterprise added credibility for its visible dedication to a cause.
Leverage your designs for charitable giving in to your Twitter strategy. Think about the relationship between Halo Pets, a holistic pet food company, and the twin sites Freekibblekat.com and Freekibble.com. Modeled on the FreeRice microgiving idea, in which visitors correctly define words to add tiny numbers of grains of rice to the total donated toward world hunger, these sites donate tiny amounts of pet food to homeless animals in shelters. Visitors take a every day multiple-choice quiz, and right or wrong, their participation adds to the kibble donation.
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7 Avoid the "too-much-information," or TMI, phenomenon. In the event you overshare along with your target audience, you may wear out your welcome. Seldom give your desired customers a reason to unfollow you. As difficult as it is to garner worthwhile followers, it can be lots of times more difficult to reacquire them, in the event that they tell their friends why they stopped following you in the first place.
8 Don't bribe people to follow you. It is thing to offer special discounts, one-time or longer-term, to your followers. It is another to post repeated tweets about how grateful you'll be for followers, or anything else that sounds awkward, desperate and plain wrong. Ask yourself if you'd make the same pitch or solicit business the same way in the event you were on the phone or in the office with the people you are courting on Twitter. If the answer is no, don't implement the strategy.
9 Ignore messages -- formerly direct messages -- and tweets that ask specific questions or offer specific comments at your own risk. If someone's taking the time to engage you on specific grounds that relate directly to what you do or what you didn't do, meet her halfway and learn something from how you are perceived, nice or bad.
10 Be the powerboat, not the ocean liner. Ocean liners need lots of space and time basically to turn around and move in the opposite direction. Twitter's short, direct communications encourage and foster nimble abilities to move in new directions you weren't expecting to go. Listen to what your customers ask, and don't be afraid to change a bad policyowner swiftly in response to criticism, or continue a special offer if few customers revealed about it in time.
11 Resist the temptation to tweet about or at an event because it is different to do so. Different killed the Edsel, a outstanding automobile with advanced features -- and a grille that looked like a chrome gourami. On a Network Solutions weblog, Joe Loong describes things you don't need people recalling you tweeted about, including that involve life and death. You don't need to be the company that live-tweeted a kid's funeral, or the doctor live-tweeting a kidney operation. Some things need not see the light of day.
12 Don't get in to a back-and-forth defending yourself against an accusation of a deal gone wrong from a disgruntled customer who clearly gets more enjoyment out of visibility than you do. Take the high road. In the long run, it is far less expensive to maintain.
13 Sign up for Twitter to help build brand equity for your business, not to become a compulsive retweeter with nothing original to say. If your Twitter output consists of nothing but what other people think, your customers and prospects have no idea where you stand and every reason to suspect you don't, either.
