Twitter can be used as a promotional tool for business. If used strategically, it can gain exponential visibility. It will also allow you to connect and communicate directly with your market and business associates.
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1. Communicate with your target market.
Everything you do sends signals and is therefore a form of communication. Consequently, keep ALL activity (even your following, who you follow and so on) on your Twitter account niche-specific. Before tweeting, be clear about your target so that you keep ANY conversations relevant and therefore consistently attractive. If you are running a competition or promotion, you can tweet something like #[promotion-related keyword] will be fun, etc ... Remember to keep in touch, even when you are not trying to promote something. This may involve communicating relevant information around tent pole events.
- Tweet at the right time of day. Remember that Twitter continually loads all ongoing conversations during the day. Consequently, it can be hard for people to find your tweets unless they are unusually inclined to search as if for a needle in a hay stack.
- Go into the 'Analyze' tab.
- Enter your [Twitter account name' and 'analyse their followers'. Click 'Do it'. This will to understand the peak time when most of your audience is likely to be active. Don't fear, most people have low percentages under 10% of follower activity at their highest points. BTW, you can re-tweet the same message at your second highest activity point and say, "Hey, in case you missed my last tweet from last night, ..."
2. Extend your reach with #hashtags
When you post messages, use hashtags. If you do not use hashtags, your messages will only reach your small number of followers. However, when you use hashtags, anyone on Twitter can access the message.
- Use keywords as hashtags for your profile and ensure that every tweet includes these relevant hashtags. These keywords may be your brand, your interest and so on.
- Use associated company names, event hashtag names and so on to show association. For instance, if you attended an event with your clients (Abusiness) and had a good time, you might post an image with a message like, "A great time you @Abusiness guys. You're #keyword rockstars. #proudxsupporter"
3. Raise your market share of followers
Followerwonk.com is the ideal tool for monitoring your market share of followers.
In the 'Compare Users' tab, do a comparison with a major competitor. Several frequency outputs will appear.
- A Venn diagram will show different bubbles to represent your competitor and you regarding volume of followers. The size of each individual bubbles will reflect the relative volume of followers. If you share followers, the bubbles will intersect. It will be ideal for your bubble to be as large as that of your industry leader and for the bubbles to intersect (which would mean that you are reaching at least some of the leader's followers).
- Another output that will appear is a percentage frequency table. This will provide relative percentages of the market of followers between you and your competitor. There will also be a percentage for the shared followers. Ideally, the percentages of your unique and shared followers should be as high to that of your competition as possible and the shared percentage as high as possible.
- Click the link to see the full list of your competition's followers. In fact, you can do this for up to 2 other competitors at the same time. Do comparisons with 2 key competitors at the same time to find followers that are common to both of them but not to you. Such followers are likely to be not simply fans who follow on a whim but truly interested people in some way. They may be experts in the field for instance. You want to get such followers on board with you too, especially those with the most 'social authority'. High 'social authority' followers are more influential because they are more influential simply because they have a high engagement rate. They are in an ideal position since their receptive audience spread their message far and wide. These tend to have the most followers who are attractive to you.
Follow these influencers. Remember! Twitter is a network of people who connect through discussion. In that case, engage with these people. They will hopefully begin to recognize and even follow you. To engage with them, get known by replying to their tweets and retweeting their tweets.
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- BTW, when you 'reply' to tweets (ie write a comment in response to a counterparty's original tweet), all of that counterparty's followers will see your reply tweet. This is therefore a great way to recruit your counterparty's followers. Your message should therefore focus on attracting them to follow you.
- Alternatively, if you want your followers to see the message, you must 'retweet' the original message to them.
4. Find business contacts.
You may use the 'Bio Search' tab to find potential business associates in a highly specific niche, even if those persons are not part of your immediate network. This is useful for finetuning searches by geographical location, specialization and so on. For instance, if you are seeking a supplier of product X in Nairobi, you can search for that; if you are traveling to an event in a country, you can search for influential people in your field that may add value to your venture in some way.
- In 'Bio Search' search window, type in keywords. If you are looking for a supply manager, put that entire term in quotation marks like "supply manager" so the software will keep the concept whole. Use synonyms also. For instance, "supply coordinator", "supply trader" and so on.
- In the 'More Options" section, enter synonyms also. For instance, rather than only search for "Manhattan", also include "New York", "NY", "NYC", etc.
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5. Some tweetiquette.
- As much as possible, always include multimedia (namely images or video). These elements enhance visibility and responsiveness.
- Tweet as frequently as possible at your optimal time of day to remain relevant. (See notes above about how to use followerwonk.com to establish the optimal hours for your followers). However, do not do this to the extent of appearing like spam.
- Consider sharing links for your offline colleagues. Do so without seeking their reciprocation. Do not make it feel transactional as in 'I did 1 thing for you, you should do 1 thing for me in return. However, if you do need help in the future, consider which of those people from whom you can seek retweets or other link sharing to promote your business.
- Mention people and ask others to mention you using the '@'. This transforms your name into a clickable link as opposed to regular text within your tweet. Clicking on @name links direct people to the profile page.
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6. Analyze your performance (regarding gains and losses of followers). Experiment with new kinds of tweet and retweet approaches, note the time and then check their impact.
- Go into the 'Analyze' tab.
- Enter your Twitter name as [ @name ]
- Select 'followers'
- Set the time period and then 'Do it'.
- Note the date of rises and falls in following. Then review your tweets and retweets for the same dates or time periods to get clues on the causes of the change in following.
- For instance, rises might be due to attending an event. If so, it a good clue regarding what you can do more of to increase your following. losses in followers are sometimes due to taking a stance on a highly 'political' issue like gay rights, racial matters, electoral candidates and so on. Losses are also likely effects of spam clearings that Twitter does from time to time.
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CONTENT RELATED TO TWITTER FOR ECOMMERCE
CONTENT RELATED TO TWITTER FOR ECOMMERCE
- Associate industry keyword hashtag tweets with your mailing list segments. When you send out email campaigns, email sequences and or tentpole marketing, include corresponding tweets that extend your reach beyond those people whose email address you have.
