Twitter is an exciting social media platform that allows you to easily see what is being spoken about all over the world. As a business owner, you want to tap into Twitter conversations surrounding your industry in the hopes of bringing further attention and recognition to your business.
Where do you begin?
There are three fundamental questions you should ask yourself once you are on Twitter:
- How do I make sure that my business’s voice is unique and heard?
- Who from my industry is making noise on Twitter?
- How can I effectively engage these leaders and their followers?
The key components to a successful presence on Twitter are Originality, Adaptation to influencers and trends, and Persistence. We will identify key ways in which you can employ these three high-level characteristics on a daily basis through a robust Twitter campaign.
1. Originality
As a business owner, you already have a good idea of what makes your business unique, but the difficulty lies in how to highlight that originality through Twitter, one tweet at a time.
First, original content will make you stand out in the sea of tweets. This is a delicate balance—you want to be engaging, but not pushy; entrepreneurial, but not too self-promoting; thought provoking, but not snobby. The best way to maintain this balance is to leverage interesting, relevant content—often including links to articles, videos, current events, photos—that aims first to engage others in a dialogue that is already happening; and second brings attention to your business. Of course, any big events or milestones are highly important to tweet and put your business on the map.
Persistent generation of appealing content will bring people to your profile, which will allow your business to further stand out. You may want to create a profile uniquely for your company, a product/service your company provides, or for you yourself. The keys are to make your profile:
- Easy to identify and therefore remember—not too detail-heavy in the description
- Unified with your existing brand
- Appealing at first contact—both warm and professional
These easy steps will highlight the originality of your business and increase traffic to your page.
2. Adaptation
Adaptation is a key component to maintaining a visible Twitter presence—a one-dimensional approach will bore other users and make your business look unattractive. One must adapt to Twitter influencers from your industry and to current trends and topics that are top-of-mind for your target Twitter audience.
There are several ways to interact with Twitter influencers from your industry—one can retweet interesting content that they have already tweeted, send direct messages to them through their handle (@influencer), “follow” them, “favorite” them, and use hashtags that they themselves use regularly. How you choose to engage these Twitter influencers is completely up to you as a business owner who has managed relationships in the past. I will, however, suggest a “two-week rule”: that is, if you have tried over a two-week period to directly engage an influencer with no reply or demonstrated interest, you should prioritize other accounts or tactics.
Second, you must adapt to trends and topics that contain buzzwords and dialogues from your industry. The best way to research these is obviously through searching #topic and seeing what the discussions are. You should make an informed decision before throwing your hat into the ring depending on the topic’s relevance to your business, the number of tweets per day mentioning that topic, and the interest of the content being tweeted. I will now suggest a “three hashtag rule”: limit your hashtags per tweet to a maximum of three. Despite people’s ideas about “reaching the broadest audience in the most efficient way possible,” no one wants to see “The health benefits of underwater baskets #underwaterbasketweaving #water #health #disease #scubadiving.”
3. Persistence
Persistence is perhaps the most important of the key components to increasing your business’s presence on Twitter. You must tweet regularly (however much you judge to be the industry standard) and keep up-to-date with influencers and trending topics. For some businesses, this means tweeting multiple times per day, multiple times per week, or multiple times per month—you will have to be the judge.
Our interconnected social media age offers vast possibilities of interaction with customers, partners, and thought leaders in different industries; and you as a business owner can leverage these modes of communication. By maintaining a campaign focused on originality, adaptation, and persistence, with time you can be certain that your number of followers will grow and your business will have a visible presence on Twitter.
