Search This… Making Twitter Work for Your Business

Jackie Weber:  Inbound Search Marketing Analyst

There are 14 million Twitter users in the United States today. By the end of 2009, Twitter is projected to reach 26 million users worldwide.

Twitter is a very powerful tool. Used correctly, it can be extremely beneficial to a company of any size.

If you look at Twitter as a marketplace and choose a strategy that makes your presence nothing more than a series of automated sales offers, you’re missing the whole point of Twitter. You become the cocktail party guest who can’t stop talking about himself. Pretty soon, the room empties.

If you see Twitter as an opportunity to join a conversation and connect with a community of like-minded people and share content which is genuinely useful to them, you will find Twitter’s rewards.  You can become the graceful party guest who mixes listening with stories and draws a crowd or at least blends in harmoniously.

If you are ready to join the Twitter party, first set your goals.

Yes, Twitter requires a strategic approach. Without clearly defined goals, your business isn’t likely to make the connections or build the relationships that Twitter offers.  Don’t be like the video comatose cartoon people floating aimlessly in the Twitosphere.  Identify what your company wants to accomplish on Twitter.

Sample Goal:
“Reach out and engage with people in our industry and potential customers, monitor brand sentiment, provide product support, and spread content of interest to the community.”

Once you have defined your goals, you need to map out your plan of action.  Identify the actions needed to accomplish your goals. Define your community. Establish a content strategy. I find that mixing business and some fun makes for a more interesting content strategy.  Your plan should address staffing concerns like protocols and time demands. And most importantly, research, research, research.

It’s a good idea to bring all your key players together to brainstorm and identify your goals. The most important aspect of any social media effort (including Twitter) should be to build relationships.

In order to be effective on Twitter, your business needs to be real and be transparent. Set up your Twitter profile in such a way that anyone visiting your Twitter page gets a glimmer of your personality. Twitter backgrounds can also give your followers a sense of who you are.

There are several tools that can help you find the people to follow on Twitter. It will take time to identify and follow people of interest, and to find influential thought leaders in your community.

Two of my favorite tools for finding followers are WeFollow and Twellow. Another way to find followers is to do a topic search in Twitter Search. Twitter’s search function is very powerful.

If someone follows you, you should consider following them back! Yes, there are some people on Twitter who I don’t follow back. You know the ones who aren’t really people and who spam your Twitter stream with way too many posts. If they want to follow me, that’s fine. But I am not going to follow them.
If someone follows you and you find their content offensive, just block them using Twitter’s block feature. That way you don’t have to see their content, and you won’t show up in their follow list.

No Twitter strategy would be complete without the ability to measure results. How you measure and what you choose to measure depends on the goals you have set.

You can listen in to conversations about your brand and be in a better position to let customers know that they are important. You can measure sentiment about your brand by tracking positive and negative Tweets.

All of these goals turned to actions can be measured. Not only can you measure the number of followers your Twitter account has attracted, but you can also measure reach, geographic interest, SEO value and even brand sentiment.

Twitter works like most other social media: You get out of it, what you put in to it. For small and medium-sized businesses with clear goals, an effective plan, and the right metrics, Twitter can be full of rewarding relationships.