What is Twitter?
Twitter is a free micro-blogging service that allows users to send and read other user’s messages (tweets) in 140 characters or less.
Why use Twitter for business?
Businesses use twitter in many, many different ways.
You could simply follow people to keep in the loop with updates about your industry. You could use twitter simply to monitor conversations. Or you can tweet content links and engage in twitter conversations.
Here are just some examples of possible uses for twitter in your own business;
- Educate yourself follow leaders, thought leaders and other interesting people in your industry to keep up to date with news, trends, opinions or to keep your finger on the pulse. Doing this alone is worth joining twitter!
- Customer service encourage your customers to follow you and contact you via twitter with any questions or queries they have. They may find this reassuring as the dialogue is open to anyone to read, making discussions transparent.
- Establish yourself as a thought leader Tweet relevant content links and opinions.
- Use twitter search and hashtags to monitor conversations about your brand, your industry, your company, your staff and yourself. And to monitor potential leads for your business.
- Use the hashtag to organise tweet-ups or for events or happenings so people can follow the content stream to keep updated.
- Tweet your own content and events. Link to your blog posts and events.
- Tweet promotions depending on your business you can offer specials via twitter.
- Follow and engage with customers / potential customers
- Tweet your questions and get answers from a crowd
- Repurpose content tweet about your newsletter
- Research - set up a poll and tweet the link to it
Learn how to set up your own Twitter account by taking the 30-day Social Media Challenge »
