Remember how twitter used to be merely a toy for techies and nerds? In the past year, the microblogging site has evolved into a mainstream tool, embraced by businesses and celebrities to communicate with their fans and customers. Of course, like every other marketing tool, twitter has to be used strategically.
Identify your objectives for using twitter. Will you use it for branding, customer service, or marketing? These are the three most common ways businesses use twitter, and may use a hybrid of all three.
Put some thought into your content. Twitter is a great place to ask questions, ask for feedback, give news about your company, or share links with your readers.
Define guidelines for tweeting. For example, will you have one corporate account, or multiple personal accounts? Many companies use both a corporate account and then individual ones. Regardless, you will want to establish brand standards for tweeting so that all involved are putting out a consistent message.
Use twitter to monitor brand impressions. Twilert is a great tool for this because it allows you to set keywords you wish to be alerted to and will then send you an email listing of who has used the keyword in their tweets. Twitter Search can also be used to do real time searches for keywords or you can set up an RSS feed to manage the process.
Follow users carefully. Identify and follow the users that you would like to target. Make sure to maintain a balance between the number of people you are following and the number of followers you have, so that you are not accused of spamming users.
Shorten URL’s whenever possible. Remember, you’re limited to just 140 characters, so URL shortening tools like tinyurl are essential.
Guard your brand at all costs. If you have unique brand, be sure to set up a Twitter account in that name to protect your brand, even if you never use it.
Tags: twitter