Over the past two years, awareness of Twitter has zoomed from 5 percent to 87 percent, according to research by Social Media Today. As one of the world’s fastest-growing information networks, Twitter is now being used by millions of people, organizations and businesses to discover and share new ideas.
Here are six simple tactics that can help you build a following for your business using Twitter, and gain customer trust:
1. Share inside info: Share photos and behind-the-scenes details about your business. If possible, offer a glimpse of new products, services or events you’re planning. Users come to Twitter to get and share the latest, so giving it to them will help you build a following.
2. Ask. Ask questions of your followers to glean valuable insights and show that you are listening. This helps start conversations that engage potential customers.
3. Respond. Respond quickly to compliments, questions and other feedback about your business.
4. Reward your customers. Tweet updates about special offers, discounts and time-sensitive deals available at your business.
5. Demonstrate leadership and know-how. You can do this by referencing helpful articles and links that relate to your business category in general.
6. Establish the right voice. Twitter users tend to prefer a direct, genuine and likable tone from a business, so think about your voice as you tweet.
It’s also helpful to know twitter terminology. Twitter users have developed short-form syntax to make the most of 140 characters (the maximum length of a “tweet”). Here are some you should know:
• Follow: To follow someone on Twitter means to subscribe to their tweets or updates on the site.
• Hashtag: Users often attach the # symbol to words in their tweets to categorize them for others, such as: “Check out our new products for the Fall: http://t.co/link2 #fallsale” Think of hashtags as the theme of your tweet.
• Mention: Once you’ve signed up and chosen a Twitter username, you and others can mention an account in your tweets by preceding it with the @ symbol.
• Promoted tweets: These are tweets that selected businesses have paid to promote at the top of search results on Twitter.
• Re tweet: When you see a tweet by another user that you want to share, click Re-tweet below it to forward it to your followers instantly.
• URL Shortener: URL shorteners are used to turn long URLs into shorter URLs.
Daniel Kehrer can be reached at editor@business.com.
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