My name is Rebecca Xiong, I’m the founder of Grow Epic. Our tools have helped 100,000 people and businesses promote on Twitter, so I can tell you all about Twitter.
Why Use Twitter for Your Business?
First of all, why would you want to promote a business on Twitter? Because hundreds of thousands of folks could be out there interested in your product and services that you would be missing out on. Also, not only are your customers on Twitter, the people who they listen to and pay attention to could also be on Twitter, so it’s important to reach out to both of those groups.
Twitter Allows Open Communication
Twitter is unlike Facebook, it is a very open platform. On Facebook, if you get a friend request from someone you don’t know it’s considered kind of weird. On Twitter, that’s entirely okay. In fact, you’re out there to connect with people who share your interests that you don’t already know. That makes it a great way for a small business to promote itself in a very natural way.
Connect with Influencers on Twitter
Also, there are people out there on Twitter with hundreds and thousands of followers, and those could be influencers that influence a large number of your customers. By connecting with them, you can really borrow their audience and get your voice heard by a lot more people.
Generate Legitimacy for Your Business
It’s also important to be on Twitter because people often check to see if you have an account and a following. That makes you legitimate. If you haven’t tweeted in a while, people might be wondering if your business is still in activity. If you are actively participating and answering questions, people get very excited thinking that you are a business they can really trust.
It’s also a lot cheaper to work on Twitter to engage new customers versus going through ads, which are getting more and more expensive whether it be on Google or Facebook. Plus, the relationship you build with folks on Twitter can last a long time and pay off over time as customers you trust tell other customers about you, or influencers you’ve engaged tell others about you.
Another example would be a local business consultant. He might be on Twitter to connect with local businesses that he wants to serve — could be his potential customers, clients, as well as other business influencers to again help spread the voice about his business.
How to Get Started On Twitter
It is actually pretty simple to get started on twitter: you create a profile, put up a picture, describe what your business is about. You’d be surprised how often we see Twitter accounts that have no description. And that’s really missing an opportunity to tell people about your business and also to tell people you want to connect to why they should be interested in connecting with you.
You could also provide a URL, which is very helpful for people as they can easily find out more about your website, your business, or your app.
Tweet Content to Build Your Brand
The second step is tweeting out content. So once you have an account, you can make new posts about news in your industry, about other updates that you think your customers might be interested in, with the new products and services, or just industrywide information.
For a local business, for example, you might also want to share news about the locality, about the city and area it’s happening in, to really become a resource for your followers.
Engage with New Audiences
The next step is to really engage new people on Twitter. Start following people who share your interests. Look at the various tweets on the topic of your business and then engage with these people.
To grow on Twitter it’s not enough that you set up your account and tweet. You also have to go out and reach out to other people, otherwise, they won’t know how to find you. So you can first engage them by liking their tweets, by sharing their content. That always gets people very excited because you’re helping spread their message and they want to return that favor.
Optimize your Twitter Engagement by Using Management Tools
Another way to engage people is to use some tools. That’s very simple and gets you results. One tool is Crowdfire, that’s helped millions of people. We also have our own tool, MyTwitterManager, that makes it pretty easy by managing the growth for you. Another option would be to hire a social media intern or a social media manager to manage it for you.
About Rebecca Xiong
A serial entrepreneur, Rebecca is co-founder of SocMetrics and GrowEpic, which help businesses with social and online marketing. Previously she co-founded Going.com, an events social network that grew to 1M members and was acquired by AOL.com. She also held product and marketing roles at Akamai and DataPower (acquired by IBM). She holds a PhD in Computer Science from MIT, where she focused on social media and data.