Written by ContentPowered.com
Twitter is a social media platform that allows users to share short thoughts with each other. Many people prefer it to other forms of social media because it is easy to use and it does not become cluttered with pictures and videos. It is not full of personal information the way Facebook is. Twitter provides a very controlled environment in which people can speak their minds and, in turn, quickly find out what their friends are doing and thinking.
How Can a Business Use Twitter?
Businesses have recently realized that Twitter is a largely untapped vehicle for advertising. Celebrities already use their official feeds to promote their latest projects and to make their fans feel closer to them. Twitter gives them a way to speak directly to their fans. Businesses with events, products and services to promote take a similar approach. People who are fans of a business know that they can follow a company with one click and suddenly start receiving news about sales and promotions. People like following companies this way because they do not have to give their private information to companies before receiving special offers and because the advertisements are only 140 characters long.
Getting Started
As easy as Twitter is to use, businesses must be smart about how they integrate it into their advertising plans. The best way to launch a Twitter campaign is to announce it on the company’s Facebook page. Many people who are fans of the company on Facebook will immediately start following the Twitter feed as well. Though people like Twitter precisely because it does not feature large images and other types of media, that does not mean that those people are not interested in seeing those things at all. By linking all of its social media together, a company is making it easy for its fans to learn about it from all angles. It is important to let fans feel like they are choosing exactly what kind of information they are seeing. If they want to see photos of the storefront or merchandise, they know to check the Facebook page. A company does not need to worry that some fans will overlook certain media. If they want to see it, they will find it.
It is vital to be patient when posting promotional tweets. A business that is new to Twitter might excitedly post more tweets than its followers want to read. Fans want to be kept apprised of news, but they do not want to feel like a corporation is invading their private social spaces. Unnecessary tweets are regarded the same way spam emails are. No matter how many great deals a company promotes on Twitter, people will stop following the feed if it becomes annoying.
Promotional Tricks
A business can show its knowledge of its consumer base by using hashtags correctly. It should attach a tag with its name to each promotional tweet, and it should try to relate each tweet to at least one independently popular tag. This will cause the tweets to appear in lists of postings that are browsed by millions of people. However, moderation is key when employing hashtags. They bring more fans to the feed, but current fans do not want to read tweets that are loaded down with tags.
A good way to keep fans interested in the business is to come up with a hook for daily updates. For example, restaurants might post about their specials, and stores could put a different small item on sale every day. As time goes on, it might be tempting to start posting the same updates on both Facebook and Twitter. This would negate the point of having a separate Twitter account. The way tweets scroll together in users’ screens means that individual blurbs about special deals will appear among tweets from their friends and favorite movie stars. It makes fans feel like a friend is telling them about secret deals.
Big specials should be promoted as if they are events. This will generate excitement among fans and also direct the larger marketing campaign. The business will eventually fall into a cycle of planning big sales and promoting them as if they were the hippest parties in town. The best promotional tweets make people feel like they are being given exclusive information, even while it is being shown to thousands of other people.
Sal Winegard
says:I’ve been using Twitter promoted tweets for 2 weeks now with not a single phone call to my business. I think you have to have a special type of online-only business to have any sort of luck with Twitter advertising. So far I have been very disappointed, and I will probably cancel at the end of this month.