The Four W's of Twitter for Small Businesses

Twitter is quickly becoming one of the most popular social media sites, with over 6 million registered users and millions of tweets posted every day. Don’t know what Twitter is? Here’s a short overview and some definitons so you don’t get lost later on. Almost everyone is on Twitter now. Celebrities, althetes, political figures, most of the people in this office. Even the President of our country. Many of the largest companies out there are tweeting, and while the list is to long to post here, just a few are Zappos, Jet Blue, Dell, Starbucks, American Express, and many, many others. While these have been some of the most talked about companies using Twitter to their advantage, a very large number of small businesses have also found it to be a great marketing tool and way to build relationships with both current and future customers.

Why It’s Important

Twitter is a great way for small businesses to become a part of the conversation surrounding themselves by both driving it and just listening. Many companies use Twitter to help monitor the environment and see what people are saying about them. Twitter allows businesses to find people talking about them and thank happy customers or resolve problems with unhappy ones immediately. Multiple situations have come up (i.e. Motrin, Skittles), where monitoring Twitter could have helped avoid huge controversy if the company had just taken some time and found all the negative tweets surrounding their new campaigns.

It is also one of the key ways some small businesses are building relationships with current and potential customers. It places your business in a social context where you can not only provide them with important information surrounding your company, but give them interesting content, which not only lets them know what you are interested in, but makes your company even more valuable to them. This is a much better use of Twitter than trying to just drive sales, which has not been seen to work as well. Users see Twitter more as a source of information, not a place they go to be directly solicited to.

Twitter has also been very successful in helping to drive traffic back to company websites. Not only can you post a link to your own website and content, but others who find it interesting can retweet it, and pass it on to even more people. Getting picked up by someone influential can lead to a lot of traffic, and potential business, for your website.

Where to Start

Ok, so you’ve gone through the simple process to sign up and now you are faced with over 6,000,000 users to sort through-- and you have no updates or followers. First, make sure your page has an identity, something that fits in with your brand image and a background that isn’t too overwhelming for people to look at. Although people do not look at actual profiles very often, this is where people will go to first when you follow them and where they will decide if they want to follow you back. Vamping your profile also involves having an appropriate picture and filled in profile information with a link to your website.

Who to Follow

A good place to begin is with people you already know. Twitter allows you to import contact lists from e-mail accounts, and will let you know which of your contacts are already signed up. Let multiple employees put their contacts in so you can find all of your clients, along with friends of employees who may be interested in seeing what you have to say. Next, you can use one of the many applications or websites that allow you to search twitter, such as www.search.twitter.com, or www.tweetscan.com, and find people who already mention your company. They will most likely to want to follow you and can help build that initial base of followers for when your account really starts to pick up. Also, make sure to include a link to your profile in any correspondence you do, including in signature lines in business e-mails or in company newsletters to find anyone these previous tactics did not and bring them to your page.

Once you have become a bit more established and have some interesting content and tweets to offer followers, you can start building a more expanded base of followers. Remember, Twitter is for building and maintaining relationships, so don’t treat your number of followers as a popularity contest, rather find the people that will be most beneficial for you to follow, and many of them will follow you in return. Finding people who are influential in your area of business that Twitter can really help, especially if you start communication with them and provide interesting content that they want to repost.

What to Tweet

Depending on what your goals for using Twitter are, many companies will take a different approach when deciding the types of things to tweet. Here are a few things small businesses can post that help make Twitter useful for them:

Be Personable: Don’t be boring and let your followers get a sense of your personality, They will feel more connected to you and when trying to build up followers, people will be more likely to follow you in return if they see a real person behind the tweets.
Company news: Let your followers know what is going on at your company. This allows them to be some of the first people to know, and will make them feel valued that you want to share the information with them before others, as well as generally keeps everyone informed.
Events: People on Twitter will spread the news about interesting events, so posting about them here will help get the word out quickly and without a lot of cost.
Ask Advice: People love to share their ideas and advice with you, it lets them know that you are listening and take their opinions into account. They can also feel like they have some part in the decisions you are making. There are a lot of smart people on Twitter, and their advcie can be very useful in getting first thoughts on new products or campaigns, and can provide new insight for your company from a customers prospective.
Offers: Although a direct sell is not a good idea, providing offers through Twitter is a good way of notifying people when they become available and provides an incentive for following you.
Relevent Information: Post links to other sites with good content and retwr tweet interesting posts from other people. It will give your followers a sense of what your company is interested in and add value for your followers.
DON’T Overpost: If you post too often, or post things people are not interested in, they will stop following you. It’s that simple.
DON’T Hard Sell: Twitter is for building relationships, not pressuring people to buy. This can also easily lead people to unfollow you.

When used correctly, Twitter can be extremely valuable to small businesses for leading people to their site and maintaining relationships with customers. When ignored, it can lead to problems being missed and opportunities not acted upon. Welcome to Twitter, have fun!

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