Social Media for Entrepreneurs Workout 3: Toning up with Twitter

I have to say that 9 months back I was a big Twitter skeptic and I chat to people every day who still feel this way. Yet I’ve seen incredible things happen on Twitter, made amazing connections with people I just wouldn’t have had access to before and driven a ton of traffic to WomanzWorld.

Courtesy of BlackHeathBugle

What’s more I’ve learned about the latest trends, news and buzz as well as been exposed to hundreds of fascinating links to blogs, websites and resources that I never would have found myself.

So what exactly is Twitter?

Twitter is a micro-blogging tool that has seen explosive growth since its launch in 2006 with over 75M users worldwide according to many statistics. In fact Twitter just reached 10 billion tweets this week.

But really it’s an incredibly powerful search engine that gives you the pulse of what’s going on in the world in real-time. There’s more women than men on Twitter too (55%), earning good money (up to $60K pa) and aged between 25-54.

Every day, millions of people use Twitter and your business has an ability to achieve viral messaging and reach an untapped audience as well as become an authority and resource people look to first.

How do I maximise Twitter for my business?

First off I always look to emulate people who are using Twitter incredibly well. Since most women love shoes, what better example than Zappos.com. Check out there Twitter page here and follow what they do.

The founder is a prolific twitterer with over 1.6M followers and also encourages his staff to tweet and integrates it into all their marketing activities. Given they were just bought by Amazon for $928 million I’d say they’re a shining example of success.

Here’s some key ways I suggest you use Twitter for business:

Marketing and Promotions:

• Give updates on new product features or services you’re introducing
• Promote competitions, incentives and exclusive offers
• Showcase the latest company news via regular updates.
• Give tips and tricks on how best to use your product or service
• Promote articles and info and news relevant to your customers

Engagement:

• Be personable, friendly and real, be the face of your business
• Quickly share information with people interested in your company
• Gather real-time market intelligence and feedback
• Build relationships with customers by asking questions and starting conversations

Customer service:

• Answer any queries or resolve any technical problems within 24 hours
• Rapidly update customers on any issues or improvements in real-time
• Help customers with using your product or service

How to get started:

1. Got to Twitter and create a user-friendly Twitter ID (@yourname)
2. Set up your profile with a logo or a photo of you to make it real, a link to your website and a short and compelling description for people who visit (remember to use keywords as people search on this, i.e Marketing solutions)
3. Follow the right people – visit Twellow (the yellowpages of Twitter!), set up your profile, then search out people in your area of business and interest and start following them
4. Get a Twitter Manager: There are several great clients to manage your account(s). I love Hootsuite and highly recommend it as you can manage multiple twitter accounts, set up lists of people and interest areas to monitor and engage with analyse key metrics on what’s working. Two other very popular ones are Tweetdeck and Seesmic.
5. Learn the lingo. I’d suggest you read through this excellent resource on Mashable.

Become a Twitter Expert

Here’s some key things that will help you to understand and use Twitter to benefit your business:

Use links: Tweets with links are 3 X more prevalent in Retweets (RTs). Use Bit.ly to shortern your URL (it’s by far the most popular and best for SEO plus it also has excellent tracking tools so you can see the number of click thrus and more.

Be a grammar queen: A whopping 98% of RTs contain some form of punctuation (compared with 86% of normal tweets), with colons, periods, exclamation points, commas, and hyphens leading the way.
Break News Original content is way more popular than stuff people have already read:

Use Proper Nouns Properly: Headline-style tweets–such as “Johnny Depp starts using FundRazr”–are more likely to go viral.

Timing: Tuesday is the most popular day to tweet as well as 4pm on Friday.

Come join me on Twitter @womanzworld and @nataliesisson

Sources: FastCompany: report: Nine Scientifically Proven Ways to Get Retweeted on Twitter – September 21, 2009

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