Twitter tips for businesses

June 25th, 2009 Posted by Missie at 2:53 pm

Early on twitter become much more than bringing together users in a social realm. With it’s popularity, twitter had expanded to see business take advantage of connecting with twitterers across the world, promoting brands, creating relationships with users and increasing sales and website traffic.

So what can you do to capitalise on twitter’s popularity as a business? By understanding a few helpful tips, it will help your business connect more with users and reach the goals your after on twitter.

Make existing professional relationships stronger and more intimate

Look around twitter and see who you can develop stronger relationships with. Find your clients on twitter and take the time to connect with them on a one on one basis. Send direct messages, send personal tweets, all these little things can mean the relationships you have spent time in the past building, will become stronger and more personal.

It’s also a great chance to give your clients and those who you want to build more stronger relationships with the opportunity to be the first to find out about new products, developments with your business and more ways they can become involved in your business success.

Get questions answered

Twitter is much more than a space to tweet something in 140 characters or less. Use twitter to utilize your followers by connecting with them and asking questions. By asking general ‘what’s happening in the world today’ questions to more specific and targeted questions surrounding your business, will help you become more personal with your twitter audience. It’s also about people power, talking and asking questions is just like typing keywords into google, but more personal and rewarding for your audience and for the success of your business.

Expand your professional network

By paying attention to @messages, you’ll see who people you’re working with are working with. If the discussion is interesting enough, you might find someone you’d like to follow on twitter… and eventually work with.

Taking that extra time to connect with your audience and network on twitter will pay off. Twitterers on twitter look for people to follow those who are interesting, personal and see someone they can learn from and connect with. @messages are a great way to start conversation and engage users with your business ideas, goals and strategies.

Promote your website and blogs

Take the opportunity to share with others what’s on your blog or website. User’s will appreciate the time you take to share what’s new. There’s a million and one websites out there and user’s don’t have the tip to check what’s new. Be a free RSS feed and tweet about your latest post or new aspect or goal achieved from your business.

It’s also a great way to open the door to feedback and allow the world to share ideas, comments and feedback that will help you open your door to improvement.

See what people are interested in

Spend a little time looking at your twitter timeline and see what people are talking about. Take that extra step and start connecting with them and engage in the discussion. Having an opinion on a topic can show others what you’re passionate about. Talk about your business niche and if you’re an expert in a field, share with others what you know. Although it may be separate from your business, even talking about the community or raising awareness on a topic can let others and those in your professional network see more to your business and get an understanding about it’s personality and the people who are behind it.

Find out when your colleagues are available for a chat

Nobody wants to bother someone when they’re in the middle of an important project, but IM presence indicators aren’t totally reliable. On the other hand, if someone twitters that they’re “searching for something to do” you know it’s a good time to check in with them. Utilize the twitter search function and search out your colleagues and those in your professional and extended business network. Also search for tweets that are in your business niche and also look for others to form inspiration from using keywords in the twitter search.

Create an ad hoc back channel at conferences

Though Twitter’s not ideal for this as it is in lacking the ability to create temporary groups or any groups at all, third party twitter group application allow it to be used effectively to bring together conference attendees and conference “watchers” — people who aren’t at the conference but would like to know what’s going on. It can also be great to group those who attended the conference or seminar and network with them and continue the conference online. It will give you and others the chance to brain storm, ask questions and debrief after the conference has wrapped up.

See our list of third party twitter group applications that can help you creating your own twitter niche groups.

Twitter is more than just noise. It’s a place when people can connect with businesses and business can connect with the world. Utilizing the potential of twitter for your business can take your business what ever it be, to the next step. Take the time to connect with others, learn more and seek ideas and strategies from people. For the web worker isolated from colleagues and interested in making loose connections into productive working relationships, twitter might be just the thing you need.