Everything You Need to Know About Using Twitter for Business

Published in

TechBear

8 min readMay 22, 2018

Employing social media marketing is essential for business success today, but many brands still need to learn how to utilize Twitter to the fullest.

You may think of Twitter as just another social media platform but the truth is that Twitter can help you expand and market your business to the world. Essentially, Twitter is a large marketing platform that’s perfect for reaching your target market. It’s true that Twitter is a young social platform. Still, it has a great user base that can be of immense importance for your own marketing strategies. Moreover, this platform perfectly complements other social media outlets. This makes using Twitter for business one of the smartest moves for your success.

Benefits of using Twitter for business

Instantly better customer service

One of the great Twitter-specific benefits involves the ability to post your business updates in real time. More importantly, your existing customers will be able to follow all your posts the moment you publish them. This is very valuable since you’ll be able to monitor the customer’s reactions and suggestions as well as use them to improve your own business. Moreover, thanks to the wonders of the hashtag, you can track any tweet that’s related to your business. This ability gives you some serious advantage over your competition. And if you start using Google Alerts as well, you’ll definitely benefit from the available feedback and response.

Using Twitter for business means less distance

Nowadays, people love to put their trust into the businesses that are open, friendly and nothing like the usual corporate image. Twitter can help you break the wall between you and your potential and existing customers. The mentioned ability to respond to the users’ tweets regarding your products, services and the general idea behind your business will help you get closer to your target market. The better you communicate with people on Twitter, the more chances there are for people to support your business.

Marketing strategies that generate more traffic

Make sure to post all your offers, promotions and announcements on Twitter. That way, you can direct the potential and existing target audience to your own business website. Basically, this is a great way to generate more traffic. Also, using Twitter for business promotion in this manner will seem very customer-oriented. New products, sales, questionnaires on the possible changes, etc. — you can use whatever new idea or business plan you have to attract the Twitter users to your business website and encourage them to stick and look around.

Learn from your competitors that use Twitter

Apart from being able to track your own business on this social platform, Twitter can be used to track your competitors as well. You shouldn’t miss the opportunity to get a valuable insight into the marketing strategies, successes and even mistakes of your competition. This is one of the best ways to guide your business in the right direction. In a sense, you can minimize the risk of bad rep or lost investments. Learning some great business moves from the competition is smart, but learning from their mistakes is even smarter. What’s more, expanding your research to other Twitter-active businesses will keep you informed on the latest trends that your target market would appreciate.

Increase Twitter visibility for your business

Retweet your own content

Twitter marks more interesting tweets that generate more activity. It will also remember the most interesting tweets that users have lost while they were inactive. So, reusing and retweeting your own content can drive and increase the success of your marketing strategy. The Twitter algorithm is more basic compared to other social media channels such as Facebook. However, this means that you need simpler actions in order to make your content more viral.

Add personality with your likes and follows

Positive actions can also increase the exposure of your tweets and mentions. Therefore, don’t be reluctant to like and engage with other brands, as well as showcase other bits of content that you like.

Ensure that the content you publish is relevant

The greatest negative impact of Twitter algorithm change is the chronological order of the timeline depending on the relevance. It is said that users have more difficulty in differentiating between the highlights and the less relevant tweets. The launch of several tweets to increase Twitter visibility has never worked because tweets have a short duration. This also creates the risk of the platform grouping all of the profiles one after another without spacing. Because of that, your activity can become monotonous and you can expect the lack of engagement and interest in what you publish from the users.

The possibility to read tweets later on

This is not something all users can utilize, but you can still make the most out of your Twitter campaign and presence if you utilize the feature that allows to save tweets and read them a bit later. This can generate better, more quality content for the users, which is extremely relevant for a social media strategy.

Learn from your Twitter followers

Learn more about the things your readers value

Do you really know whether you are generating the desired impact on your readers? That’s what the positive comments on your Twitter are for. In addition to your ego, they can help you know if you are correctly transmitting your value proposition. This is a key element for both a blog and a company because it differentiates you from the competition and builds loyalty among your followers.

Analyze the negative comments with care and levelheadedness

Negative comments or even complaints are very important to keep in mind if you want to learn from your Twitter followers. Still, you have to differentiate between negative comments and plain insults. But, when you ignore the trolls, even negative comments can help you understand that there are other approaches as valid as yours that are worth considering.

Understand and address the needs of your readers

Knowing your readers is part of the success of a good blog. So if you are able to meet their needs you will earn some bonus points. Twitter allows you to connect with your followers and listen to them first hand. This is an amazing opportunity since you can always get valuable insight into what your readers want to see from you. Moreover, things you can learn from your Twitter followers in regards to your articles, for example, can save you time and effort you’d put into coming up with your own theories and ideas.

Identify your potential partners through this social media channel

Twitter is a great tool to expand your social network and find potential partners. That’s why you should write each tweet carefully. If you are lucky you can catch the attention of people who want to collaborate with you. But for all this to happen, it is imperative to write quality and relevant tweets for your followers.

Learn from your Twitter followers and grow your ideas

The best thing about Twitter is that by interacting with hundreds of people you are able to learn from them and incorporate unexpected concepts to your point of view. This is an essential part of any company’s growth and can really shape up your brand nicely; not to mention bring you closer to your followers and target market.

Use Twitter Chats for business

On Twitter, unlike LinkedIn for example, you do not interact with people formally. Twitter is more casual and generally used to publish memes and gifs. Twitter chats are basically that — chats or conversations on Twitter with people with the same interests and/or knowledge that seek advice, feedback or simply share some information. There are many different types of chats that happen on Twitter, but for the most part, they are quite professional and provide useful advice on a specific market.

In order to find specific Twitter Chats, you should search by topic, day, description or hashtag. Once you find some interesting chats, check the links on Twitter. Make sure they are still active and that the talk is still valid.

How to make Twitter Chats?

There are three main tools that will help you in the making of Twitter Chats: Tweet Chat, tchat.io, and TWubs.

It is better not to chat on the Twitter platform itself. The conversation can flow very fast, so these tools will help keep up with the conversation easily, in real time. Also, if you do it from the Twitter platform and not from one of these tools you risk forgetting to add the hashtag to each tweet, which these tools do automatically.

The workings of Twitter Chats

As a chat host, you must publish the chat rules and post them in the profile on the account or publish them in tweets before you start chatting. Use a question and answer format. The most advisable thing is that you already have a couple of questions ready to be answered. When there is a particular answer you want to get comments on be sure to tag the person to let them know you are responding to their response, just like you would tag them for a normal tweet. When someone writes something you like, do not hesitate to give retweet it and like it. As simple as that.

You can use Twitter chats to obtain, collect and distribute information. There is a Twitter chat for each business and they allow you to interact and connect with people in fields that you would not normally have the opportunity to mingle in. Basically, chats on Twitter can open many doors in many ways if you use them correctly.

What NOT to do when using Twitter for business

Be unprofessional

There are many ways a company can be unprofessional on social media. But when Twitter posts are concerned, the main thing to avoid is to use all caps as well as poor grammar. Also, don’t be plain rude or involve yourself in controversial drama unnecessarily.

Share the same things over and over again

No one wants to be spammed and if you use your Twitter to constantly post the same content, you’ll spam your target audience. So, if you have some content that you want the majority of your followers to see, do a checkup on the best Twitter posting times. That is going to be a lot more effective than sharing the same stuff many times over.

Automated tweets

Automated welcome emails are truly beneficial when it comes to your email marketing efforts. However, social media, and Twitter especially, is completely different. Twitter has to be all about showing your personality and connecting with your audience. If you want to boost your business success with Twitter’s help, you need to forget about automating your account.