Using Twitter for Business – Best Practices to Boost Your Business 140 Characters at a Time

Twitter has emerged as a leading force in social media marketing. Punching above its weight, the website that lets you post only up to 140 characters at a time is now an integral part of any business’ online marketing campaign. If you are not using Twitter for business yet, you are missing out. After all, you can attract more customers through the social network; and most importantly, it is quite likely that your main competitors are using it. Therefore, it is about time that you useTwitter for your business.

Here are the best practices you should follow for setting up your account and marketing your business on Twitter.

Setting Up Your Account

Like most social networks, setting up Twitter for business is quite simple. Initially, you only need a valid email address. You will also have to select a username for your Twitter page, but I will elaborate on this in the next section. Once you’re done providingyour email address and selecting a password, Twitter will send you a confirmation email. After confirmation, you will be shown your profile.

You can edit the theme if you feel it does not suit your business. However, that may not be as important as adding a profile picture and a 160-character bio as these help your existing clients recognize you and inform your new clients about what you can do for them. For your profile picture, the safest option is your business logo. As for the bio, you need to convey the core message of your business. The rest of your profile’s information is related to your business’ location, website and other social media pages.

Selecting a Twitter Handle

On Twitter,a username is called a ‘Handle’. There is a 15-character limit on the Handle, so you have to be concise. The best option is your business’ name, but if that is not available, you will need to come up with an alternative. Remember, the Handle you select represents you on Twitter, so you have to be careful. The ideal options for businesses are keywords that describe your products and services and your own name. Avoid adding symbols, numbers or capital letters as they make the handle difficult to remember. However, great thing about using Twitter for business is that it allows you to change your username, a service other leading social networks don’t offer.

Learning to Tweet

The most important part of how to use Twitter for your business is learning to tweet. Tweets are your medium of communication with your target audience. And it is crucial that you tweet regularly to keep your followers engaged. In fact, you should set up a tweeting schedule to make the job easier. As far as the content of your tweets is concerned, here are some ideas you can use:

• Share content (blog posts, videos, audio) posted elsewhere on the internet that is relevant to your niche.
• Retweet what people you follow have posted.
• Use calls to action like ‘check this out’, ‘vote for’ or ‘what do you think about’.
• Add links in your tweets as that boosts the number of retweets.
• Stay positive regardless of what you are tweeting about.
• Don’t oversell or over-promote your products in your tweets.

Responding to Followers

With the growing number of businesses on Twitter, people have started using this social platform as a personal sounding board. So, they’re bound to often share opinions, queries and complaints regarding businesses. It is crucial that you respond to any follower that asks a question or complains about something related to your business. The communication on Twitter should not be one-way; this is one of the golden rules of using Twitter for my business.

Starting Conversations

Responding to your followers is one of the best ways to strike up a conversation about your business. For instance, if a follower mentions that they going to visit a particular city in the coming week, you can reply by sharing the location of your business there and any great offers that are currently available. While this may not be the most effective use of Twitter for small business, you can use your creativity to keep driving the conversation towards your business. And this is not restricted to when followers post about you; a random tweet from your side can spark off a conversation. This is something you have to learn to be successful while using Twitter for business.

As you can see, Twitter is easy to use and can work wonders for your business (www.twitter.com). The key is to follow the best practices outlined above. In addition, to expand on the messages you share through Twitter, you can have a blog on WordPress (you can learn about quick and easy WordPress setup in less than 10 minutes) and connect to the world. So, don’t hesitate to get social to help your business soar.