Twitter is a way to communicate with friends, family, co-workers, and in your case, prospective clients through the exchange of quick and frequent statements followed by short responses. Tweeting is known as micro blogging, which means the posts are short in length, frequent and have a short time span.

Twitter can also be described as a new and unique way to communicate. Micro blogging messaging has a short life span, however every post has the potential to be seen and shared by everyone connected to you, whether directly or indirectly. Each post is in turn recycled, if you find a post interesting or relevant to yourself you have the option to ‘re-tweet’ the post, giving the original poster credit, as well as increasing the life span of that specific post. As a business Twitter user, it should be your aim to have your tweets re-tweeted, and be exposed to as many users as possible. The potential exposure of a single tweet is exponential, all it takes is a couple of retweets which in turn get retweeted by others and, before you know it, your post is seen by thousands of users (not to mention potential clients).

Tips for Creating Your Account

Follow industry-related people to ensure your feed of posts are relevant to your interests.

Tip: Try a service like Twellow whereby you can search a specific phrase and all the registered Twellow users with that phrase in their bio will pop up; from there you can follow those much sought-after tweeps.

Follow people back who follow you (with exception to those suspect fake accounts). Write a comprehensive bio. Don’t be scared to add a little bit of you to your bio, after all, there’s an actual person behind every Twitter account.

Tip: Include keywords and key-phrases in your bio it makes finding you a little easier. A little SEO never hurt anyone.

Benefit Your Business

The main benefit of Twitter (and most social media platforms) is that it gives your company a human voice to which customers have the opportunity to relate. Like other social media sites, it’s a great platform to advertise on. Use this space to let followers know about changes in the company, new products, sales and promotions, but don’t limit your social media platforms to advertising. Remember to interact and show your customers what the company is all about, while sharing valuable content.

Building a Following

Twitter has a ‘who to follow’ function which suggests people to follow. This function will analyse who you currently follow and suggest similar accounts to follow. This is important to remember when building a Twitter community. You want to ensure you keep your follower base as industry related as possible - so ensure you follow the right demographic. Another great feature for building up your Twitter community is the “lists” function. With this function you are able to add related people to topic-specific lists, thus keeping your contacts sorted, for further information on Twitter lists check out this article. Another great way of ensuring you follow the right people is to identify expert Twitter users in your industry and to follow them.

Time to Get Tweeting

Every tweet has a restriction of 140 characters which means a bit of planning will need to go into every post. Always try to include hashtags where possible, for example: A post about social media could have the hashtag ‘#sm’ at the end of it. The purpose of a hashtag is to make posts searchable. For example: If someone searches for the hashtag “#sm’ all posts with the social media hashtag will pop up.

Due to the constant nature of posting on Twitter it is highly recommended you try using a tweet scheduling service such as Bufferapp or Hootsuite. With these services you can schedule multiple tweets ahead of time to ensure your account is active even if you’re not.

Tip: Try to keep the interval between tweets reasonable. I keep an hour gap between my tweets to ensure I don’t spam my followers.

Another great feature about these services is the “analytics” functions that come with them which allow you to track the exposure of your every post.

Tip: Twitter is an international platform, which means you need to plan your tweets around certain timezones. Try a service like Tweroid which suggests the best times to tweet for maximum exposure.

Always ensure you engage any interactions, for example: If someone retweets one of your posts make sure to thank them. Twitter is after all a social media platform, so engaging tweeps cannot be emphasised enough.
A tweet is one of the best ways of promoting your blog content.

Tip: Due to the limitation of characters though, the links to your articles may be too long. A good way of sorting this issue out is to use a service like Bitly which shortens a url.

When put to proper use a Twitter account can be one of your most powerful forms of content communication.  Due to a high level of automation you can streamline your Twitter account to work even when you’re not. With every tweet having the potential to be seen by thousands, it’s simply a matter of generating the right quality content to be shared by all. Happy tweeting!

Previous article in the series: The Company Facebook Page; Next article in the series: An Introduction to LinkedIn

Julian Karstel is a Digital Marketing Consultant for Sound Idea Digital | @JulianKarstel | Julian@soundidea.co.za

Sound Idea Digital is a full service digital agency | www.soundidea.co.za

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