Diving In: Marketing on Twitter

If you haven’t checked it out already, we recently published a blog post on social media as a general overview to how it can effectively translate into leads.  While that post was helpful, and addressed a lot of major concern about the topic, we thought it might be even more effective to dive into how to properly market on each of the mediums we discussed in that post.  There is a lot more that has to be done before the consumer clicks through that landing page, giving you a nice new sales lead.  Thus, here is the first in this social media series on how to correctly market on Twitter.

If you haven’t tried Twitter yet for your own personal use, you really should check it out.  I myself don’t necessarily “tweet” that often, but it’s an excellent way to get real time news updates or headlines from publications you care about.  By checking my Twitter a few times a day, I can guarantee that I’m up on all of the latest issues and trends in the world, most of the time before any of my friends or family.  It can pretty much be boiled down to one giant interactive news feed.  What do I mean by interactive?   This is where the marketing comes in.

Many people who do not use Twitter, or view it as a silly and useless tool to type 140-character messages, do not recognize the immense value Twitter has to offer from a business perspective.  For example:

  • Twitter is an excellent way to have a conversation with your customers.  If you could find a way to interact with your client base without either side having to pick up a phone, wouldn’t that be beneficial?  By “following” someone on Twitter, and soliciting their following of your account, you become a subscriber to their newsfeed, seeing every post with the opportunity to reply to or “retweet” every one.  Have your CEO tweet answers to questions for an hour every week, or ask your followers some questions like “What’s YOUR favorite feature of [really cool product you sell]” and retweet the responses.  This interaction with consumers is what makes Twitter such a hot commodity for marketers and is a great way to drive awareness and traffic to your other sites.
  • Twitter is quick.  Obviously blogs are a great way to have consumers keep up with what your company is doing, but blogs tend to get abandoned by CEOs or CMOs because they require a certain amount of effort and thought behind each post.  Twitter is limited to 140-character mini-posts, therefore making it easier for all of your contributors to tweet from wherever, whenever.  Your busy on-the-go CEO can engage with consumers in between morning meetings or during a commercial break.
  • Twitter is a monitoring genius.  Even if your CEO doesn’t want to get personally involved in your company’s Twitter efforts, it’s a great way to monitor what people are saying about your company or your offerings.  One day I tweeted about Walgreens messing up the prints of photos from my digital camera (everything was black and none of the photos came out).  Within minutes of tweeting that, I had someone respond to my tweet from the official Walgreens twitter, asking what happened and which location.  Pretty powerful stuff, huh?  Sure it was kind of creepy, but I am still a happy Walgreens customer because they went out of their way to rectify my situation, which is an impressive feat.  I think it’s kind of a no-brainer for companies to have a completely FREE window into the mind of a consumer.  Isn’t that what we’ve been trying to do all along anyway?

Watch for part 2 of this post, where we dive in and do a review of a “marketing on Twitter” e-book!  Until then, give Twitter a try!

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