What can Twitter do 4 your business

From an engagement standpoint; the Twitter environment is always a challenge for brands social skills. If you think you can broadcast yourself to success on Twitter you are on the wrong path. Delete your account before you hurt yourself, your brand and others. Today Twitter has a lot of eyeballs with more than 200 million users and they are growing. In March 2011 they added 460.000 new users and there are now more than a billion tweets every week.

Twitter in short

• You can quickly share information: Help your audience to be aware of your company and engage with you in “real time” right now. Remember the context of the conversation. If your brand reply a two day old question on Twitter; then you are out of the social context.
• Listen and gather information: Earlier I have told you about search.twitter.com or the advanced one search.twitter.com/advanced. Both are very powerful tools to understand what your audience is saying about your brand, industry and your competitors.
• Awesome networking platform: Twitter is a great way to find influencers in your industry and connect with them. I’m developing great relationships with people around the globe who I first met on Twitter. I develop and build relationships on Twitter and then I take the relationship to the next level and it can be connecting on Facebook or Linkedin.

Easy to get started on Twitter

Twitter is very easy to kick start on the spot; you need an email address and it takes 3min to register and set up an account with your bio, web-page and your own design. In first sight it looks like a chat function but it’s not private. If you want to be private you can use the direct message function. Be sure that you understand the difference between @mention and Direct Message before you do anything; check yourself before you wreck yourself.

Let’s get down to business

Twitter is an awesome opportunity to listen and gather information online. You want to remember that Twitter in its environment is a two way conversation and when you have a dialogue you need to listen; agree?

You need to make time to be in that conversation if you believe business is built on relationship. What could possibly be more important? Still I here companies out there: We are special here at company X; we want to really have time for our customers and we don’t have time for involvement on Twitter but we do Facebook. What a heck?

If you continue to ignore Twitter your brand will suffer; because people are still talking about your brand and they are calling you on the social media telephone and you are not answering because you are ignoring.

The purpose here is not to write another blog post how to use Twitter. My purpose here is to start a dialogue about what Twitter can do for your business. Maybe you not even have a Twitter account? Maybe you already are a savvy Twitter user and you are landing a Klout score close to 100? What is the pro and cons here? Please let me know don’t be shy!

Related posts:

1. Track the influence of your Twitter account
2. Who Should Have The Pen and Bring Fire to Your Business Blog
3. How To Create A Social Media Strategy For Your Business