Twitter in Business Management
April 7, 2017 - 8 minutes read
Twitter in Business Management
A most modern alternative – Twitter, the number one micro-blogging site on the Internet that made status updates popular before Facebook took control of our lives. Most people use Twitter as a news feed to follow online magazines, celebrities and friends, and its fast moving news feed often informs its users of world events in seconds, long before official news outlets such as the Associated Press can report them. Twitter popularized the use of IRC terms such as “@”, which sends messages to other users, and “#”, which trends topics to spread among other users. Its limit of 140 characters, which can be distributed to traditional cell phones, smart phones and computers, keeps status updates simple and its servers unclogged. How can entrepreneurs tap Twitter’s viral marketing abilities to their own advantage?
Here are three examples illustrating three very different lessons.
Faithful Customers
Woot, an online retailer based in Carrollton, Texas, used a simple approach. The company opened several “Woot” shops on Twitter – for example, wine would be sold on http://wine.woot.com-and offer a single deep discount product at midnight every night to Twitter followers, who could purchase the product immediately. Woot’s 1.5 million users would then re-tweet the message to their friends, which would have a cascading viral effect, increasing sales volume drastically. Woot’s success illustrates a key lesson for Twitter success – daily updates and the use of re-tweeting to general exponential followers.
Location
Kogi Korean BBQ, a small business of four roving food carts, teaches another valuable Twitter lesson – that size doesn’t matter when you have followers. Roving food trucks might generate regular sales, but once they change locations, regular customers might never find you again. Ever since co-founder Alice Shin started informing customers of its Twitter feed, the food carts have gone viral, attracting over 50,000 followers that follow Shin’s updates for the latest location of Kogi’s food carts. As followers re-tweet Kogi’s feed, the company’s popularity grows exponentially. Since using Twitter, Kogi went from using 30 pounds of meat daily to over 1,000!
Find New Customers
Rose Associates, a real-estate marketing and management company in New York City, found another use for Twitter – as a replacement for Google. Since the entire micro-blogosphere of Twitter can be searched from its search box, Rose Associates decided to get proactive, looking for apartment hunters rather than wait to be contacted. The company uses ten primary search terms, such as “New York apartments” or “no fee rentals” to filter out possible candidates looking for an apartment. The company then contacts the Twitter user with a reply (using the @ feature) in an attempt to land a rental. Although only half of these unsolicited ads lead to real rentals, the company saves the money it would otherwise spend on online and physical advertising by using Twitter’s free search service. The lesson here – don’t underestimate the power of Twitter’s search box and its ability to invade people’s lives (sometimes in creepy ways) for your benefit.
These are just some ways to make money with Twitter. Viral marketing campaigns often require creativity far outside the traditional box. However, once you find a plan that works, a solid Twitter marketing plan can save your company lots of advertising expenses.
Tips for Promoting Your Business on Twitter
Twitter promotion is one of the main reasons that businesses of all sizes have been flocking to Twitter. Twitter can be an integral component of any plan to market your business on Social Media (others include Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pinterest).
Twitter lets you instantly get the word out about your product, service, project, or idea. But to promote your business on Twitter effectively, you have to be the sort of poster that people will choose to follow, as only your followers will ever see your tweets (posts).
What you have to do to get followed? Just follow these Twitter promotion rules:
How to Use Twitter
1) Don’t sell – converse.
Twitter has been described as a virtual water cooler. Imagine you were really standing by one chatting with your co-workers and a stranger walked up and launched into a high-pressure sales pitch. What would you do?
And doing the same sort of thing online by sending out sales pitch after sales pitch will get the same response.
Your goal on Twitter is to converse with people, not send them running. They’ll get interested in your products and/or services without you waving them in their faces all the time. Especially if you follow the rest of the rules for Twitter promotion here.
2) Listen more than you tweet.
Beginners especially should pay close attention to this rule. Being on Twitter at first is like being at a party full of strangers. The first thing to do is to find out who they are and what they’re talking about.
That’s the only way you can figure out how you might fit into what’s going on and make your own contribution.
So the first step in learning how to use Twitter is to choose people to follow and read their tweets. Use Twitter Search to see what people are saying (tweeting) about particular topics that interest you.
3) Be helpful.
Of course you should tweet, too!
It’s just that you have to make sure that your tweets aren’t perceived as ads. Your posts need to offer people something, whether it’s information or entertainment. And don’t forget that you can reply to other people’s tweets, too, answering their questions or commenting on their ideas.
Helpful people are people that other people want to converse with. People that you actually converse with are going to be the most receptive to your message.
4) Give your followers what they want.
I’m guessing that you don’t care that I’m sipping a decaf coffee as I write this or have a doctor’s appointment later today.
5) Don’t just feed them feeds.
If you have a website with a RSS feed, it’s easy to set up Twitter so it will automatically read and send out your feed – which is great. But don’t just leave it at that.