Here are some helpful hints on the artful and effective use of Twitter to market your business.
There are many differences between a personal twitter account and one used for business. With your personal twitter account you can say anything you like, get your friends worked up and spark furious debates. With your business account, you will likely be wise to tread a little more lightly.
What is the most effective way to market your business through Twitter? We may not know all of the answers but SmartRules would like to share what we have learned about interesting and effective tweeting.
Share Relevant Information
It is important to understand that “relevant” can cover a very broad spectrum. @SmartRules tweets court news and, not surprisingly, those are our most popular posts. But little tidbits of news are often very popular as well. Our tweet about California allowing smartphone users to use maps on their phones while driving was very popular
Test The Waters
Post bits of news that aren’t immediately relevant to your business but are interesting to you and see what gets retweeted. This gives you an idea of what your followers are interested in. One of the advantages to broadening the information you share is that your tweets will reach a broader audience.
Use The Right Tools
TweetDeck
TweetDeck is an invaluable tool. It not only allows you to schedule tweets days, months and years in advance, it also allows you to create columns and lists to make it easy to find interesting retweets, new people to follow as well as see who is retweeting, mentioning or following you. This application allows you to take the massive amount of information on twitter and easily find what is relevant to you.
There is a standalone application and a plugin app for Chrome. At SmartRules we prefer the standalone application.
Unfollowers
Not only do we like to unfollow anyone who has unfollowed us, we also like to know how many new followers we’ve picked up. If we it looks like we have ten new followers and we find out that we lost five, we know that we’ve actually gained fifteen new followers and that makes us happy.
There are so many tools for tracking so many things on twitter. Instead of getting overwhelmed by all of the options out there we use unfollowers.com.
Avoid Controversy or Embrace It?
While controversial tweets or those slamming your least favorite political party might get you a small firestorm of retweets, it is a good idea to look at whether they will alienate your current or future clients. At SmartRules we keep controversial opinions to ourselves, or use our personal twitter accounts. However, if your business is specifically geared toward one political party or belief system, your twitter popularity may well thrive on controversy.
Don’t Over Market Yourself
You will get more response by sharing interesting information than you will by flooding your twitter account with “hire us” & “buy from us” tweets. You can absolutely tweet about different situations where your services and products are useful, but we suggest keeping it down to about 25% of your tweets. If you plug yourself too much your followers will tune you out.
Take the advice from the blog Why Does Most Lawyer Marketing Stink? to heart: “Good marketing causes an emotional response. It touches us somewhere deeper than we expect. It moves us, even if just a little.”
Or as State of the Grind says: “I believe you should tease your listener and not hammer them. Give me a little bit of something and I will want more. Give me too much of something and I will reject it.”
At SmartRules we had some guidance as we began our foray into the world of twitter, but much of this we have figured out on our own. Hopefully our experience can help you get comfortable with and excel at tweeting in short order.