Twitter is an online social networking service and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based messages of up to 140 characters, known as "tweets".
Twitter is a valuable tool for any business, big or small. Whether you’re a one-person operation or part of a large social media team, creating a presence on Twitter is a great idea.
Top 10 Reasons Why Businesses Should Be Utilizing Twitter?
Search Engine Optimization – Social media will only get more and more important in search engine optimization. Bing for example has a deal with Twitter to display data in its search engine and also uses Twitter data in its ranking algorithm. B sure to use the keywords from your search engine optimization strategy in your tweets to help ensure search engines understands your core areas of expertise.
Understanding Trends – If you are a local or regional business it can be important to understand what is hot and top of mind in your area. You can use this information to come up with creative promotions and offers. Twitter’s local trending topics can provide interesting insight into what your area is talking about right now!
Customer Retention – Retaining existing customers is important to the long-term health of your business. Sometimes though unhappy customers won’t directly communicate their problems. Use Twitter Search to monitor terms related to your business to help spot unhappy customers and solve their problems.
Public Relations – Many journalists use Twitter. Use JournalistTweets.com to find journalists in your industry on Twitter. Instead of sending them worthless pitch emails, begin to build a relationship with these journalists on Twitter to gain media coverage.
Competitive Research – Twitter has some of the best application programing interfaces (APIs) on the web and data on the service is public to all users by default. This makes it easy to pullout valuable information. Use a Twitter client like Hootsuite to monitor keywords about your competitors and gather information about them.
Growing Other Social Media Communities – Make sure to cross promote your Facebook and LinkedIn company pages on your Twitter account. Provide an opportunities for fans of your business to engage with your business on their preferred network.
Market Research – Research has always been a marketers best friend. Sometimes you need an in depth market research project. Other times you need less information but you need it fast. This is where Twitter comes into play. Asking questions to your Twitter community can be great free way to gain some insight on an issue.
Trade Show Marketing – Every marketer wants their trade show booth to be a hit. Use online communication to drive offline interactions. You the conference hashtag in your tweets and promote offline gatherings and contests on your Twitter account to raise awareness of around your efforts on the trade show floor.
Sales Enablement – The more information a sales person can gather about a lead the more qualified of a conversation they can have. By including Twitter profile data in your marketing database and your customer relationship management software, you can provide your sales team with recent tweets from their leads. This helps them to build trust faster and close the deal.
Building an Email Marketing List – Email marketing is still a major channel. make sure to sharing ways for Twitter followers to join your email list in an effort of increasing the chances that you can convert them into lead for your business.
Hashtags?
Larger companies can host tweet-ups with a custom hashtags to answer customer questions. Hashtags not only allow for an easy way for others and those involved to keep track of the conversation, but they also allow more exposure for the hashtag itself—by being included in a user’s tweet, his or her followers will see the hashtag and this may cause them to start participating in the conversation.
If the hashtag includes the company’s name, this provides name exposure and recognition.
Additionally, if a user RTs a company’s tweet that includes the hashtag as well, the company is not only getting an @ mention, but their hashtag remains visible.
Clearly, making weekly hashtag tweet-ups part of a company’s overall Twitter strategy can help build community and increase social media brand exposure.
Another way to utilize hashtags is in social media campaigns is when running a promotion or contest. Give Twitter users an entry for every tweet they send that includes the hashtag.
Whether it is hosting a tweet-up, answering customer questions, running a giveaway, or raising money for a good cause, utilizing hashtags can help businesses keep track of conversations, raise brand awareness, and garner ideas from other Twitter members for new products or ideas.
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