Written by ContentPowered.com
Twitter is one of those platforms that looks obtuse and useless from the outside, but has a crazy number of people investing a lot of time in using it, to great effect. Really, it doesn’t seem as though a platform built around 140 characters is going to have a lot to offer a business, particularly in a world where long, valuable content is seen as the pinnacle of marketing. Then you see the hordes of people making money through Twitter growth and you wonder how you can get a slice of the pie. Fortunately, you can make money through Twitter both directly and indirectly; profits are easy to find if you use the platform properly.
An Active Profile Draws Users
Twitter users like content. That’s why they’re on the platform. Keeping a profile active brings in users, particularly when you have something interesting to share. There are only a handful of types of content you can use, which makes it easy to keep yourself active with a simple checklist.
- Original tweets composed for the platform. These are not retweets, do not link to other sites and may or may not include a hashtag to contribute to an ongoing discussion.
- Retweets from other users, either in response to a comment or as a way of promoting the opinion or information in the original tweet.
- Links to outside content, whether it’s your content or the content of other people. You should share both, with a preference towards interesting content from other creators.
Try to post a few of each type each day, but experiment to find which types of content are seen as the most valuable among your audience.
Twitter Messages Can Advertise Specials
Have a product to sell? Want to drum up a few more sales this week? Run a short-term promotion and advertise it on Twitter. Give Twitter users a coupon or a link to a special sale page, encouraging them to follow you if they want more deals in the future. This is one good way to give Twitter users some value in exchange for following you, even though that value still returns to you as profit. As an added benefit, each user attracted to your products because of a special is an opportunity to upsell a higher tier of product or sell them accessories or service packages.
Twitter Giveaways Encourage Timely Conversions
Giveaways do the same thing as specials, complete with the opportunity to sell accessories to the winner. The big draw of a giveaway, however, is the ability to broaden your audience by giving away one of your products. There are social gating apps that require a Twitter follow in order to enter a contest, for example. You can also run a contest manually, requiring text, image or video submissions tagged with a particular contest hashtag. Just make sure you’re attracting the right audience with your prize; if it’s something unrelated to your business, the people who follow you for it will be likewise unrelated.
Tweeting Blog Posts Grows an Audience
You have a website in order to sell products. It has a blog in order to drive users to the product pages. That blog can be successful by providing value to the users in the form of content. You create content to attract more users, convince them of your value and get them to convert. You can then share that blog post on social media – including Twitter – to expand your audience and get more users to visit your blog. Twitter is particularly useful, because it’s very easy for other users who like your post to retweet it, reaching a larger audience. Twitter doesn’t even curate feeds the way Facebook does.
On Twitter, hashtags are a way to categorize conversations. Some tags are used for ad campaigns or contests, to keep the content easy to see all in one place. Some tags are used for global social justice issues, political issues or current events, to aggregate a lot of disparate discussion in one place. Many tags are used to run ongoing discussions around a single topic, to provide a way for users to keep in touch with each other, like a LinkedIn Group or forum board. You can take advantage of this by finding relevant hashtags and taking part in conversations there, linking to your content when it’s relevant.
Someone on Twitter is more successful than you are. Chances are a lot of people on Twitter are more successful than you are. Some of them are probably in your industry. You can take advantage of this fact by following their accounts and retweeting their content, adding your own commentary to add to the discussion. You can augment this by writing blog posts about their content and linking to them in a response, which gets the attention of both your audience and theirs. If they retweet your content for further discussion, you gain that much more exposure.
Following Thought Leaders Brings Great Advice
There are a lot of very intelligent people on Twitter, and they often post snippets of useful advice or answer questions that may be pertinent to your business or the way you run things. Following these people helps you stay abreast of industry developments, keep up with trends in management and reputation, and more. You never know what sort of valuable advice you might find from following the right people on Twitter.
Social Listening Inspires New Products
Social listening is the concept of watching and studying your audience to find out about them. You can learn what they like and what they hate, what they’re having problems with and what their common gripes are with your products and your competitors. All of this helps you figure out how to help them. If their questions are simple, answer them on Twitter. If they’re complex, answer them on your blog. If they’re problems you can’t solve with information, develop a new product to help. If they’re having issues with your product, figure out how to fix it.
Twitter for Customer Service Inspires Trust
Twitter is an extremely responsive, quick and visible platform. This makes it excellent for customer service. If a user tweets a question or issue to you, do your best to answer it quickly and satisfactorily. You can see some great examples of Twitter customer service on Social Media Examiner. A successful customer service experience gives you a satisfied customer and an audience that can see you’re worth their trust.
Twitter Lead Generation and Follow-up is Powerful
Twitter recently debuted lead generation cards, which help significantly when it comes to finding and developing leads. Learn to use them and you may be shocked at how easy it is to pull in new interested customers with a high conversion rate.
