5 Twitter Tips To Help Your Business

Twitter has redefined the way we communicate with each other and millions around the world are using it to connect with people, share information and form business partnerships. If you are a business owner, Twitter can help expand your business.

There are, however, right and wrong ways of using Twitter. Businesses who are looking for quick cash would be ignored and cast aside by the community. Business reputation might even be poor within the Twitter community. In order to get the most out of Twitter, you must think about what you can do for others instead of what others can do for you.

Here are five tips when using Twitter:

1. Connect with the right people

What is the point of having 2000 or 20,000 followers when none of them care about what you have to offer? Connecting with the right target audience will help you improve your relationship with them and send qualified traffic to your website.

2. Provide Value

The more value you provide on Twitter, the more you get out of it. People follow you for a reason, so make sure you don’t disappoint.

3. Network with others

Don’t be shy to communicate with others and respond to their updates. Twitter is a networking site. It’s a many-to-many communication service. It’s not just about you! Start talking to the people who interest you and build a relationship from there.

4. Know the limits

If you are a business owner, you should know that what you say on Twitter could help or harm your business. Don’t say anything you don’t want others to hear about in a professional situation. I suggest having a set of guidelines so that anyone in charge of the business profile would know what to do and what to avoid.

5. Listen to your audience

Twitter is up 24/7. That means that you have constant access to what folks need, want and are talking about. By listening to what they have to say on Twitter, you can create new products, improve your existing ones, and find new partners.

Twitter is not for everyone. If you are not willing to spend the time and effort, you are better off not using it at all. Managing a Twitter account properly takes time, and you shouldn’t cut corners in that regard. By providing real value to your followers, you can not only build relationships but also drive thousands of qualified leads to your business for free.


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Five signs your business is not ready for social media

Your business won’t survive unless you embrace social media.

Countless business owners have heard these words. Is there any truth to them? Perhaps in some instances. But in far more, social media, no matter how important, is still something that should be approached thoughtfully and strategically.

The truth of the matter is that social media isn’t right for every business, and not every business is ready for social media. How do you know if your business is ready? Here are five signs it isn’t.

You think Facebook and Twitter are social media. Popular online communities like Facebook and Twitter are a big part of the social media landscape, but if the first thing you think of when you think 'social media' is a handful of websites, you should probably hit the brakes. Social media is about much more than specific sites; it has far more to do with the way your business can interact with customers and stakeholders using the internet.

You don't know where your customers are online. Consumers may love the hottest social media sites, but do your customers and stakeholders? If you can't answer that with a confident 'Yes!', jumping into social media head first is sort of like jumping into a pool before you know there's water in it; you'll soon discover that what you need isn't there.

You're new to online marketing. While there's nothing inherently wrong with making social media your first destination on the online marketing train, pragmatically-speaking, social media probably isn't the best starting point for a business that is new to online marketing. After all, determining whether a social media initiative is succeeding (eg. achieving goals, producing ROI) in many cases requires coming up with ways to 'quantify' data that is really qualitative. Needless to say, that's a particularly tall order for a company that hasn't even experimented with forms of online marketing that are entirely quantitative, such as paid search.

You're unwilling, or unable, to put a value on your time. Signing up for a Facebook or Twitter account may be free, but managing a social media presence isn't. Businesses that won't consider the cost of the time invested in social media to be a real cost with a real dollar value have unrealistic expectations and in my opinion are far less likely to sustain their social media initiatives over the long haul.

You see social media as a panacea, not as a channel. Social media may have the ability to do wonderful things for your business, but it's not the miracle diet pill of the marketing world. In other words, it isn't going to double your revenue overnight, make your customers happier with a snap of the fingers, etc. At the end of the day, no matter how powerful social media is, it is still but one channel.

Why Business Needs to be on Twitter

Here are seven reasons every business needs to be on Twitter.

To Interact with Customers

For most business, it's far easier and more profitable to generate continued or new business from existing customers than it is to acquire new ones. Growing existing customer business requires ongoing communication. Staying in touch with customers on Twitter is not only more real-time than many other techniques, it's also far more cost-effective than direct mail, attending trade shows, picking up the phone, or even maintaining a customer newsletter. It's not that Twitter can replace other touchpoints completely of course, but it can reduce the required cost and frequency of high-touch interactions.

To Interact with Prospects

Just as many of your customers are probably on Twitter, so are your prospects. They care far less about your advertising than about what your customers are saying about you, and how you respond. An active Twitter presence enables you to demonstrate strong customer service, rather than just claiming you offer it (after all, who advertises poor customer service?).

To Influence the Influencers

Industry analysts, journalists, bloggers and other influencers from most sectors of the economy are well-represented on Twitter. Tweeting content of your own that will interest them (i.e. not just your marketing materials), retweeting content they post, and engaging in dialog is a great way to get these people talking, and writing, about your company. It's less formal, more “social” and usually more effective than “cold” outreach.

To Gain Market Intelligence

The fact that customers, prospects and industry thought leaders are all using Twitter make it a valuable tool for monitoring the topics and concerns being discussed. This is a great potential source of new product/service enhancement ideas as well as topics for blog posts, white papers or other content.

To Become a Resource

Prospects don't care about your products or services—they care about solving their problems. Demonstrating your knowledge of their industry and their challenges, for example by tweeting your thought-leadership blog posts and white papers, makes you a resource they can go to for helpful information. That gives you the opportunity to explain how your products or services can help them, in a consultative fashion.

To Give the Business a Personality

Business websites are, necessarily, one-to-many communication. No matter how compellingly your site presents your value proposition, it's still formal and impersonal. Twitter is a much more casual and conversational. Again using the example of Zappos, CEO Tony Hsieh has been successful on Twitter by sharing his personality. Unlike a company website, Twitter is immediate, informal and personal.

To Be Part of the Conversation

As noted above, your customers, prospects and key influencers are already having conversations about your industry, your competition—and quite possibly your company—on Twitter. If you aren't participating in that conversion, you're missing valuable intelligence, business opportunities, and possibly even the opportunity to prevent damage to your firm's reputation.

Twitter is far more than a 140-character soapbox for celebrities, spammy “Internet marketers” and the incorrigibly obnoxious. Savvy business tweeters can filter out the cacophony and create valuable dialogs with key participants in their marketplace.

How To Add Your Business To Twitter Places

If you have a business where people check in, an office, retail store or restaurant or bar, you can and probably should add your place of business so that people can simply click on your place and add the address automatically.

It’s a pretty cool characteristic from a Twitter standpoint because you can tell people where to meet you or where a big event is happening then Twitter will add the location details, including a map, without cutting into your 140 characters.   

                             

The image above is what people see at Twitter.com when they click on the location part of your tweet. (Tweetdeck and Twitter for the smart phone all seem to handle it a bit differently, but if it catches on I imagine you’ll see this added to all 3rd party tools.)

There are a duo things that will likely hold large scale adoption back. First people with lots of random followers won’t always want to give their location away and you’ve got to turn location on in settings and manually choose it each time. However, I do believe it will be used for events and can’t hurt to get your business listed.

Here’s how you get listed. (There is no formal process you just add your business as a user)
1) Log in to twitter.com and got to setting – make sure “Add a location to your tweets”
2) Go to your home page and write a tweet.
3) Click on the location at the bottom of the tweet (it will ask to choose your current location and try to find you)
4) Click on whatever location is there and scroll to bottom and select search places (unless you already see your location on the list)
5) Put in your City to search and then after it searches click Add This Place
6) Enter the name and address of your business and that’s it.
7) Now when you tweet from your business it will add your location and others can choose it too.

How To Use Linkedin To Generate Business

While Social Media is definitely the hot topic of conversation this year, most of the tools focus on consumer centric business, and improving communication. If you provide B2B consulting, services or products, your options for social media are fairly limited, let’s be honest you probably won’t find many fans for your Facebook Legal Incorporation Services page. For these types of businesses, LinkedIn is a much better alternative. Here is a collection of tips I recommend using.

Update your profile

If you or anyone on your key executives, creative talent, or sales staff doesn’t already have a LinkedIn profile they should create one. Chances are though that most people already have an account, and unless they recently changed jobs, there profile hasn’t been touched in a while and could use some updating. Here’s an example of a before and after LinkedIn profile from Guy Kawasaki that has some excellent examples, but if you’re short on time here are the highlights:

Add your voice. Everyone has a personal style, way they talk or do things, and your profile should reflect your voice, quirks, and personal style, its what makes you memorable. Want your profile come up more often and for the right searches? Here are some tips from LinkedIn on adding the right keywords to your profile.
Go for the Readers Digest level of detail. Give details about what you did at your previous jobs, and what schools you went to. Give some details, but not too much. Try to be like a mini skirt, long enough to cover the essentials, but short enough to keep it interesting. Here are tips from LinkedIn on building a stronger profile.
Get connected. LinkedIn has put out a lot of stats that the more connections you have the more business you are likely to get. Unless you want to be a LION, I suggest connecting only with people you know.
Get recommendations. Again, LinkedIn has a lot of stats showing recommendations help you get business. Ask previous and current clients you have done business with, or people you know for recommendations, and give them back. Be honest and don’t make everyone sound like Superman, if you don’t have something nice to say, it’s probably best not to say anything at all. Try to keep getting referrals, someone with 6 referrals spread out over 3 years probably looks better, than someone with 20 referrals all more than 2 years old. Here are some tips on getting and giving LinkedIn recommendations.
Vanity URL. LinkedIn started offering vanity URLs years ago, if you don’t have one get one, it looks much more professional than a random string of numbers, here’s mine: Michael Gray’s LinkedIn Profile.
Link to Your Website. You can add up to three links, and if you choose “other” you can customize the anchor text, use it but don’t abuse it.
Create a company profile

LinkedIn now has the ability to create a company profile for your company, it will list everyone who works there and some information about the company. If you don’t have one you can create it, but only if one of the email addresses connected to your profile is from the same domain as the company website. You don’t need to do this but it makes your company look more complete, and provides a tool for reputation management should you ever need it. Here are some tips on building an effective company profile on LinkedIn.

Groups

Groups are a double-edged sword, joining more groups can make you look more important, but at a certain point it becomes unmanageable. I suggest starting small and building up, and trimming down, based on the conversations and your ability to participate. Here’s are some tips from LinkedIn on getting more out of groups.

Getting involved

It should go without saying, but to get any value out of social media you have be social, and participate, that’s why limiting your contacts and groups is an important part of the process. Search Engine Land has a group on LinkedIn and you can see there are quite a few active discussions. My suggestion is read the group guidelines and watch before getting involved. Don’t try to be a know it all and answer every question, but answer the ones that match your area of expertise. Also if a discussion is a few days old with no comments, earn some good karma by answering if you can. It would be nice if LinkedIn showed your activity in groups on your profile page but, currently it only shows on the homepage when you log in.

Questions and answers

Another way to get involved is to ask/answer questions, working on a research project ask your peers for an opinion or run a poll. If you want people to answer your questions or polls, make sure you answer there’s from time to time. As a general rule I would answer 2-4 times as many questions as you ask.

Update your status

You can send status updates on LinkedIn the same way you send status updates on Facebook and Twitter. If you’re interested in efficiency, you can save time using services like Ping.fm (http://www.ping.fm) to update all of your services at once. That’s generally not a strategy I’d recommend, your Facebook friends might want to know your kids won the baseball championship, your LinkedIn network probably doesn’t care, so choose your updates strategically.

Did you publish a white paper, interesting article, bit of research, or complete a project, that’s something that’s much more appropriate, for a status update, and don’t forget to put a link where appropriate.

Finding the time

While the owners of LinkedIn would love it if you logged in every day, that’s probably not the best use of your time. Logging in once or twice a week is enough for most people. Answer some questions, participate in one or two groups, and post a status update, you should be able to do this in less than an hour a week.

Power user tip

You can be strategic about your participation, use the built-in search functions in the groups and answers sections to create searches to find questions targeted to your expertise or the service your company provides. Use Google’s custom RSS feature to notify you when the topic comes up. Another solution is to use Google Alerts with a [site:linkedin.com "your keywords"] search.

The payoff and getting business

When you create a LinkedIn profile and join groups, you set up contact preferences, every action you do can be included in these update emails other people in your network get. You won’t get included in every email, but you will get included in some, and the more you participate the more you’ll be included. Every time someone sees your name and your activity on the network it reminds them you are there, and what you’re doing. The more they remember you the more likely they are to refer business to you when someone asks them a question about something they’ve seen you participate in.

Use the power search tips to target phrases of people who are asking questions that someone in the sales funnel would ask. Use your network, to help you gain new leads, ask everyone to describe their ideal customer to you, if you know someone who fits the bill make a connection, people are much more likely to give referrals to people who give them referrals.

To wrap up, make sure your profile and the profiles of your other key team members, company is up to date, and sends a professional memorable message. Update your network of connections and make sure people are aware of you, ask about the types of business they are looking for, and pass on referrals. Join and participate in some groups, look for and answer questions. Use power search tips to get notified of questions and discussions that match your expertise. Using these tips you’ll gain exposure, and get referrals from your network, and help out qualified potential new customers.