3 Ways To (Seriously) Leverage Twitter For Business In 2015
For those who believe that Twitter will be left out in the social media rat race in 2015, you’ll be disappointed.
According to Jeff Bullas, there are over 241 million monthly users on Twitter and the figures are just continuing to increase by the day.
Twitter is used by not only bloggers and influencers like Jeff Bullas but as well as top level brands. Namely Virgin Airlines and Nike.
Through my social media consultancy experience, representatives from various companies usually pop up these questions:
- We want to leverage on Facebook only
- Twitter? I thought that isn’t a good marketing platform
- Why should we invest time in Twitter?
I could go all day with hundreds of reasons why Twitter marketing is still important but let’s get to the topic.
I’m not asking you to ditch Facebook, Google Plus or LinkedIn.
As a matter of fact, the main point here is that you need to incorporate Twitter to gain an upper hand in marketing.
In this article, you’ll find three ways to leverage Twitter for business in 2015. Of course, do share with us how you use Twitter for business using the comment form below.
1. Monitoring the current trends
Twitter makes it really to monitor the current, trending trends.
While you can monitor them manually using the standard timeline, it is extremely challenging if you have thousands of followers.
This is how you can monitor the current trends on Twitter.
Twitter web application (free)
Login to your Twitter web application and you will find these:
What does this means to you?
- You can find for trends for specific location (example, United States which is my default)
- These are keywords and hashtags that are currently used by majority of the users (incorporating them will lead to higher visibility)
HootSuite (free & paid)
Yes, I’m a paid HootSuite customer and also one of the HootSuite Ambassadors for the APAC region. While this isn’t about giving publicity, I could be slightly bias 🙂
How can you use HootSuite to monitor the current trends? See below:
With HootSuite, you can monitor specific hashtags and even your competitors. In the example given, I shared several hashtags I’m monitoring.
The timeline are refreshed once every 5 minutes (if you are wondering).
How does this helps your business in online marketing?
You’ll be able to see the latest updates especially Twitter trends with near precision.
Of course, the next step is to share a topic, provide a solution or just engage with others related to the topic.
2. Twitter as an engagement tool
Twitter is often considered as a real-time engagement model. This means that people would use Twitter to engage with brands.
The engagement can be in a form of sales inquiry, complain or compliment.
Either way, brands and businesses should maximize the power of Twitter to build even bigger brand awareness.
An important tip here is to use Public tweets instead of a Direct Message.
Let’s take a quick example of a person sending you an inquiry via Twitter. Your support team would be able to reach out and connect with the person (and probably closing the sale) immediately!
The moral of the story here is that nowadays, people are less interested with the usual email contact. They would just reach you out on social media and get close to instant answer for their inquiries.
If you are looking for more ways to engage with your audience, here’s a blog post you can refer to: Ways to keep your followers engaged on social media.
3. Using Twitter to analyze your followers (target market)
You probably use Facebook Open Graph or Insights, Google Analytics and even Google Webmasters for for your everyday analytics.
How about Twitter Analytics?
Twitter Analytics is a free and powerful tool to find new target markets.
When it comes to marketing, you got to understand your target audience. For example, you need to know:
- Who are they?
- What are their interests?
- Where are majority of your readers from?
Nowadays, marketing is all about selling the right product to the right people. That’s exactly what you’ll get when you use Twitter Analytics for business.
Here’s an example of what you’ll get from Twitter Analytics.
With the above information, I know that:
- The top 5 interests are: marketing, entrepreneurship, leadership, startups and SEO
- A large chunk of my followers are from USA, UK and Canada
- Need more specific information? You can even know the percentage of male vs female (not in image) and the states as well
How does this helps you with your online marketing strategy?
- You could configure the right tweets targeting the specific audience
- Sharing tweets according to their time zones
- Using relevant hashtags to reach out to more of them
While there are many other strategies that you can impose, these are the common ones that you can use immediately to enrich your online marketing strategy.
How are you using Twitter for business?
I hope you find this 3 simple Twitter tips useful. Before you close this page and head over to the next one, leave a comment below and tell me what you think.
First image: http://www.pinterest.com/pin/222646775302507634/
Reginald Chan
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