Part of using technology to your advantage includes having a social media presence where your customers are. And that may mean Twitter is a part of your mix. Even if you’re uncomfortable with (or fearful of) this environment, you need to push past that if you want to be a player.
So the primary question now isn’t really Should my business be tweeting? But rather How often? And to follow up on that: What do I tweet?
There are no perfect answers to these questions. The best approach is to just go for it—develop some sort of plan and implement it and see what feels right for your business and your audience. Then keep tweaking it.
The plan might include:
- Set days you will tweet. Example: Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
- A balanced mix of tweet types: stories, news, case studies, offers, “asks”
- Relevant posts—not posting just to post. Don’t blast the universe every day with meaningless tweets. Think about whether you’d engage with it. Is it interesting? Are you helping someone? Are you offering something?
- Engage with what is happening. If you tweet but never keep an eye on the responses, you won’t know if your audience is being engaged in our message. You should check Facebook and Twitter every day, and respond to your customers in real time.
- Be flexible. Try posting tweets at different times of the day to determine when your customers are most active. Test different types of tweets to see what gets attention. Keep refining your strategy.
- Research your audiences’ tweeting habits. While Facebook offers analytical tools to determine customer activity, Twitter does not, unfortunately.
There are many third-party resources out there to help you, including:
- Tweriod: This free Twitter tool will tell you when the best times are to tweet as well as analyze your tweets and your customers’ tweets.
- SocialBro: Helps you optimize your Twitter strategy by analyzing your top 100 twitter followers and producing a report to help you engage specifically with that audience. It also has expanded Social Marketing and Listening and Insight services available at reasonable cost.
- HootSuite Auto-schedule: Use this tool to schedule tweets to post automatically for you at the prime times when past tweets have performed well.
We give a tweet about your business and keeping it lively and engaging for your customers, using technology to your advantage. For more ideas, contact Techno Advantage today!
