The great thing about using Twitter for a marketing campaign is the ability to have real-time conversations with people. The bad thing about using Twitter, again, is the ability to have real-time conversations.
Anyone using Twitter as a business tool needs to have time and staff dedicated to monitoring the account – which includes not just sending timely responses to comments and queries, but also making outreach a part of the effort. In the social media world and economy, it’s time to fine-tune your time-management skills.
And we’ve learned a few things along the way we wanted to share.
1. Search Your Way to Opportunities
Finding the right audience is the hardest part; how and where do you begin the right conversations with the right people? The great thing about Twitter is that it comes with its own search engine. Search.twitter.com lets you search for industry trends and trending topics by plugging in keywords and by targeting a specific area. Demographics on a dime.
2. Stay Visible
Tweet often (we recommend at least 3 times a day) to stay active and alive on newsfeeds and also to boost your SEO rankings. We also recommend spending some time crafting keyword rich posts to ensure they tie in to your content and your business. While it may not sound possible at first, creating rich content in 140 characters or less is a definitely possible and gets much easier with practice.
3. Just Say Hello
Social media is about listening, responding, reaching out and building relationships. Not very different from traditional marketing or interpersonal relationships, we know. But the forum, now, is very public. Which is a blog post for later.
However, the principle still stands. The best way to make friends is to make them feel at ease. Once the keyword search has been done, the contacts have been found and added to your lists, all that’s left to do is say hello. Strategies and promotions can wait for later. Obviously, not too much later, but that’s another blog post as well.
