Twitter is a logical step in the evolution of the Internet and has become one of its essential components; it is a platform dedicated to real time experience which matches the need for a constant stream of novelty with bitesize packets of information to satisfy the limited attention span of the modern consumer. It combines the flexibility to keep abreast of current events with a sustainable means of engaging with potential customers, and it offers a suite of useful features to enterprising businesses: it also has approximately 330 million active users – if you’re not taking advantage of this platform, you’re missing out on an ideal opportunity to make money.
Twitter is based around short, pithy sentences of a limited number of characters, and relies on hashtags and @usernames to amplify topics and particular tweets. Users who follow one another can communicate by direct message, and it’s possible to interact with almost any user by retweeting of mentioning them in your own content.
There are two aspects to optimising this social media platform for business: advertising and branding – juggling the two might require some tradeoffs, but a proper use of the available options will amplify your business results considerably.
When it comes to advertising, Twitter offers two different kinds of ‘cards’ to improve the effectiveness of an ordinary tweet. A free account set up for your business can produce as many ‘product’ cards as you like, as long as you have the multimedia available to add to the card. These cards allow for a tweet optimised for engagement – images or video, links, commentary, and review information can be combined to make a powerful and visually engaging offer to any prospective customer. Once your card has created an engagement, you can get to work on your conversion.
Alternatively, you can let Twitter do most of the work for you with ‘lead generation’ cards. When you’re using Promoted Tweets – running a basic ad campaign – your advertising pitch gets upgraded with a button which allows a customer to provide you with their name, @username, and e-mail address directly to your database with one click. Even if you don’t want to pay for this neat trick, Twitter provides you with analytics to determine how well your efforts are performing, and its campaign management page offers a wide selection of parameters to narrow down your target audience.
It’s also worth mentioning that Twitter provides the option of promoting your account; this is useful for building long-term trust and reputation, and a successful campaign will cause your account to appear in the ‘who to follow’ section of the user’s homepage.
Twitter really is the place to build a brand. Twitter chats are custom made for audience capture because they function as a hub for people who are already interested in a particular niche. A straightforward pitch is a mistake, because such conversations aren’t a captive audience, but they’re a perfect opportunity to do some market research and contribute useful content; it’s certainly possible to identify high-quality prospects by sharing content related to your business with interested people in the conversation.
Twitter can also function as a real-time complaints department; not everyone can dominate Twitter like some of the top companies do, but everyone appreciates a quick response, and a small Twitter team can make a huge difference to the overall experience of interacting with your business. Even better, managing complaints in an exposed way is excellent at drawing in new customers. All sorts of people will be able to see your business’ engagement with customers and they are likely to respond positively to seeing your interactions even when you’re not directly engaged in advertising or marketing.
Engagement leads to engagement; this is how Twitter works, and this is why it’s not going away – if your business is on Twitter, it will always be connected to your customer base.