One of my favourite tools in social media for business purposes is Twitter. It allows you to expose your business to a lot of people at no cost, and only a little bit of your own time.
Why use Twitter?
Here are some benefits:
• Create backlinks to your website in order to increase your website’s backlink count and search ranking
• Create new relationships with other users
• Gain new clientele for your business
• Customer service
What are your goals?
For me, social media is simply an advertising tool. Along the way, you can build relationships with people, provide your value proposition, help boost your own website’s ranking, and eventually sell your product/service. Twitter provides me that opportunity at zero cost.
People who are following you are the only ones who regularly see your tweets. But if they don’t know about you, then you won’t be followed. So how do you get followers? Every time you Follow someone, they most likely get a notification stating who just followed them, and will see your profile. Make sure your profile is not spammy, and that it is personalized, with a value proposition if possible, and definitely a website link if applicable. That person then has the option to follow you back.
Use scheduling tools such as HootSuite or Tweet Deck to set up your messages and schedule throughout the day to provide activity to your account. People are not on the computer 24/7, so you need to spread out your marketing messages. These messages should also be set up with your website links for two reasons: 1) Viewers can click on it to go to your website and 2) It creates a backlink to your website for SEO purposes
While automation will allow you to be more productive throughout the day, if you get Mentions and/or Retweets to these messages, try to reply to these people, as these are your building blocks to building relationships, which can eventually turn into a sale or even a referral! Thank them, get to know them by having conversations, and provide value. This is not the time to push your product/services. Nothing is more annoying than being on the receiving end of an initial message where you are being “sold” on something when there is no relationship established. It’s tasteless, and downright rude.
In most cases, I follow back users who’ve added me. One of the reasons is because I’ve always believed in two-way communication for any relationship. Direct Messages (DM) can be used to send private messages to a specific user without the public needing to know about it. I use it specifically for customer service reasons, although I use it to chat with people too where the conversation doesn’t need to be public.
The problem with DM’s is that it is overly abused by other people to send out spam messages, such as “like my FB page”, “I’d like to share a mind-blowing opportunity with you”, or “here is a free report just for you”. Like, why do I need this stuff? What’s in it for me? I feel like I’ve just been “sold” on something I don’t even need, from people I don’t even know, yet it was shoved in my face anyways. In my opinion, DM’s should only be used after two way communication is first established through @ Mentions/Replies. The most annoying part of DM’s is having to go in to clean out your DM box of all these messages. It has also been proven that DM usage of this type has resulted in a 245% increase in unfollowing, so don’t use it for this purpose!
Use Twitter properly, and you’ll soon have a followers list that you can communicate and do business with.
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