The Power of the “Tweet” for Your Business
Why is it that birds rarely have mid-air collisions? It’s all about instantaneous communication. While constantly twittering back and forth, a flock of birds maneuvers through the air in virtual unison.
The popular social media platform, Twitter, is based on the same principle of gathering a flock to follow your “tweets,” hence the name. Never mind the cute moniker—Twitter has grown from a nifty way for people to keep up with their buddies to a major business tool.
Twitter is a communication platform which enables your business to stay connected with customers and other interested parties. The main strength of Twitter is that you can use it to quickly share information with your loyal following, while also allowing you to engage in casual conversation and relationship-building with customers and potential customers.
Twitter is ground-breaking in its simplicity. It consists of concise, easy-to-read, easy-to-write messages to share with your following. Twitter allows you to engage your customers, while allowing them to respond. And that’s what we really want, isn’t it? Response.
The Twitter process is not one-way. Your followers can (and should be encouraged to) share their experiences with your company on Twitter, enabling you to gather current market intelligence and feedback. This gives you a fantastic opportunity to manage your reputation and build a perception-based brand that fluidly responds to consumer wants and needs. The potential for you to understand the mind of your audience alone makes it worth spending an hour or two a week on Twitter.
As with most aspects of social media, creativity is key. You can use Twitter to share updates, photos, special coupon offers, links to your website and blog, announcements, special events, etc. One of the greatest aspects of Twitter is that results are almost instant (think flock of birds). For example, your business might send a tweet announcing an iPad contest which can be entered when people visit your website and join your opt-in email list. People interested in your type of business may “re-tweet” this to friends. At that point, not only will your Twitter following grow, so will your website traffic and email list. And sales usually follow.
Sounds pretty cool, right?
Twitter allows you to write and read messages of up to 140 characters, or the length of this sentence, including the punctuation and spaces. Since SMS text messaging allows up to 160 characters per message, tweets can easily be shared via text message. Indeed, millions are sending and receiving tweets directly via cellphone.
At this point, you may be wondering, “How does all this information translate to my business?” Let me just share one more fact: In 2010 the Twitter platform had over 105 million registered users, with 300,000 new users signing up each day. Over 180 million unique visitors came to the site every month, and an average of 55 million tweets occurred each day. That’s a huge flock, folks!
These are just the basics. Believe me, there’s much more flap to chirp about.
To get started, visit http://support.twitter.com/”http://support.twitter.com and read through “Twitter Basics.” Before you know it, you’ll be learning to fly. With good strategy and consistency, Twitter can help your business soar!
Kelly Walker at Incyte Marketing: 541-419-9976. Kelly@incytemarketing.com
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