If you were a business owner before Twitter was around, chances are most of your marketing messages (aside from maybe your company slogan) were at least somewhat longer than 140 characters. With the explosion of Twitter both as a marketing tool and a social media platform, you may feel like the medium places difficult restrictions on the types of messages you can reasonably fit into the space provided. However, this may work to your advantage – here are some tips on how to use Twitter more effectively for spreading the word about your business.
1. Embrace the social aspect. The whole point of twitter is that it’s supposed to be conversational. Making sure that you’re speaking with your followers rather than just at them is one of the main keys to keeping people interested in what you have to say.
2. Don’t ramble. The 140-character limit is there for a reason: to keep things short and sweet. Don’t use it as an opportunity to split a 500-word essay into a million tiny pieces – choose your most important message and break it down to its most essential component.
3. Be retweet-friendly. Be generous about retweeting content from others that you think would be relevant to your audience. In return, make it easy for others to retweet your content by leaving enough characters free for the necessary “RT @handle” text at the beginning of the tweet.
4. Get the balance right. No one wants to read a hundred tweets from you in an hour, nor do people want to follow an account that only gets updated once a month. Put out a handful of tweets per day, and let the size of the handful be determined by the level of interaction you’re getting from your audience. Space tweets out so that there’s not a big clump of tweets followed by a lot of silence.
5. Show your expertise. Twitter provides the perfect platform for sharing your knowledge. You can use the search function to look up keywords relating to your field, and when people ask questions you know the answer to, you can step in and help them out. This not only helps spread the word about your business, it shows that you really do know what you’re talking about.
As with most social media, balance is key – say what you have to say, but be respectful of how other people use the platform, and over time you’ll build a strong following. Are there any other tools or methods you’ve used to help build your Twitter reputation?
