So you’re thinking about using Twitter to market and brand your business?
If so, then you’re not alone!
As recent studies show, the working class age group (ages 25 – 54) is the largest demographic on Twitter, and this means businesses are flooding the site to market and network in mass.
But as a business who is thinking about diving into the whole “Twitter thing” with their own marketing, you need to remember 2 key points that will help you maximize your time, efforts, and chances at growing your business:
1) Your customers like be “taught to” and not “sold to”. This is such a critical point for any business getting started on Twitter. And when you spend enough time on Twitter you’ll see the masses of people that are “selling to” you – and it’s a HUGE turn off.
Customers are the same now as they were before the Internet and Twitter – they want to be taught about “why” “what” “how” and “how it will improve my life” or “how it will eliminate pain”, etc… The same customer is alive and well today, and a lot of those customers ARE in fact on Twitter!
The way you teach, support, and improve the lives of your customers (which then leads to sales) is by providing valuable, informative, and productive content – or tweets on Twitter. Just like in the old days when someone called you on the phone – you took your time to explain, educate, and lead your customer.
2) Realize that Twitter is a permission based platform. Before Twitter came along, the way you achieved permission based marketing was through mail list building (direct marketing) and blogging (email subscribers).
Now let me make one thing clear here – I’m a huge believer in having a blog and I think it’s critically important to the success of your business. So I don’t want you to think that blogging and email subscribers is dead – it’s not! You MUST have a blog and build a loyal audience of readers and subscribers.
With that said, Twitter allows people to quickly and easily subscribe (follow) your updates. Since people “volunteer” to follow you, this makes Twitter a permission based platform.
Because Twitter is permission based, you need to realize that just a quickly as someone decided to follow you, they can just as quickly un-follow you as well.
Again, people aren’t going to tolerate being marketed to in most cases. If your updates aren’t valuable and productive, you can’t expect to grow your audience.
However, if your updates are insightful, helpful, and useful to others, then not only will you grow your audience, but your influence will grow as well and this means other people will begin retweeting (or sharing) your information with their followers.
Twitter is powerful in this way, as people give you permission to send them your updates, and your updates are timely and productive, they in turn begin talking about you!
The way others talk about you on Twitter is through link sharing (providing links back to your site), retweeting (sending your tweets on to their followers), or in physically contacting you by phone or email – and all of this means you are building “authority” in your niche and brand for your business!