Being a business owner, it becomes immensely important for you to find which social media platform suits best for your business. Twitter being a leading social media platform attracts a lot of businesses toward it.
Thus, if you are planning to use Twitter for business and set up a Twitter business profile, then you would definitely be struggling with these questions:
- Is Twitter Useful For Business?
- How To Setup Twitter Business Profile?
- What Are The Benefits Of Using Twitter For Business?
- What Are The Top 10 Reasons To Use Twitter For Business?
Click here to download detailed infographic on top 10 reasons to use Twitter for business.
Is Twitter Useful For Business?
With more than 300 million active users, Twitter is an excellent platform for businesses to reach & connect with the new audience. It is a go to social network for business to communicate with their fans & customers effectively. Businesses at all scales have been using Twitter to grow their business. Another reason that encourages businesses to promote their product or service on Twitter is that it costs very little to promote a product on this platform. It is also quite easy to set up and maintain a Twitter business profile. Let us learn how.
How To Setup Twitter Business Profile?
If you want to use Twitter for business, the first thing you need to do is set up a Twitter business profile. Here are the steps to do so quickly.
- Create a Twitter account for your business simply by signing up on Twitter. You can enter your own details at this point since everything can be customized later
- Pick a short and sweet Twitter handle for your business. It will be used for @mentions
- Upload brand logos and graphics as your Twitter business profile picture and header photo
- Change the Twitter business profile name to your business name
- Write a crisp bio clearly explaining what your business does and add location and relavent links
Well you are all set now. All you need to do to use Twitter for business is to follow people, make connections, and send out Tweets. You can use Statusbrew to schedule Tweets too.
What Are The Benefits Of Using Twitter For Business?
Before proceeding ahead with marketing your business on Twitter, you must decide what are the goals that you want to achieve from Twitter business profile. The common Twitter benefits include:
- Generating leads & sales
- Increasing Brand Awareness
- Building better Customer Support channel
- Creating a positive opinion
- Building community
Deciding the goals for your Twitter business profile will always help you make the best use of Twitter for business. Here are a few points that emphasize the need for Twitter for business.
Connect to Customers
Twitter is growing rapidly. It provides an excellent opportunity for businesses to look for potential customers. Not only it offers them the chance to find new customers but also connect with the existing customers. Using Twitter business profiles, brands can interact with customers to discover the brand positioning in existing customers and resolve their customer's problem.
Increase Brand Awareness
With exponential growth in social audience, it has become essential to build brand awareness. Twitter allows you to connect with new users with its promotional ads. You can select demographic and run ads to reach out to the new audience using your Twitter business profile.
Build a Customer Support Channel
You can use Twitter to monitor what people are talking about your brand online and in case if you come across negative reactions or comments from customers, you can resolve it quickly to not let the situation go out of your hands. Moreover, you can also interact with your customers to discover what they expect or think about your product that would help you to develop a better social media marketing strategy and provide inputs to improve your product or services.
What Are The Top 10 Reasons To Use Twitter For Business?
10 reasons for using Twitter for your business
- Twitter marketing is the social currency
- Twitter is open
- Great for communicating with your audience
- Real-time conversations
- Identifying and targeting customers is easy
- Drives traffic to your website
- Best platform for customer support
- Heaven for marketers
- Expanding your market reach is easy
- Numbers don’t lie
1. Twitter marketing is the social currency
Wait, what is social currency?
I came across this term while reading Jonah Berger’s book, Contagious.
It’s basically the knowledge that people have which they share with others that makes them seem cool. Like a fantastic fact that water can boil and freeze at the same time.
Cool right?
Similarly, having your presence on Twitter is like social currency for you and your customers. If you're not using Twitter for business, you are already behind.
With Twitter business profile, you get bragging rights. You, because you can connect with your customers quickly and drive more leads into the sales funnel from Twitter and your customers because you are easily accessible to them and they are happy with your service on Twitter.
2. It is open
Twitter’s aim as a Social Network has always been to promote open communication and easy access to connect with the fellow community members present on the Social Network.
Almost every conversation that your prospects have with your competitors is open on Twitter, every conversation that your audience has with their followers is open.
This is a goldmine of Customer Insight!
With this ability to see open conversations you can find your potential customers that might use your service for an intended purpose.
Using Twitter for business helps you in finding the pain points that your customers have and then pitching them accordingly.
One other advantage of having Twitter for business being open is that other prospects will be able to discover your brand and see how you talk to your existing customers and then maybe make the decision of subscribing to your service. It will create a sense of responsibility and ownership when communicating with your customers as a brand.
But there are hundreds of conversations happening on Twitter. But, how do I find out relevant conversations?
Since you are using Twitter for Business, you probably have a niche that you are targeting related to a particular keyword that they are searching for. To help you save time and optimize this process, you should use Twitter-based tools like:
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Statusbrew: You can search for a particular hashtag using Statusbrew's Listening feature and look for conversations in real time that are important to you.
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Hootsuite: It enables you to look into streams of the keywords that you are targeting and jump into the conversations that you can contribute to.
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SproutSocial: As great customers service tools for Social Media come, they are the best at it. You can track your mentions and directly have your team reply to that.
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TweetDeck: With this tool, you have an amazing amount of freedom to monitor individual profiles, specific conversations, hashtags, keywords, etc. You can even post natively on Twitter or schedule your content.
3. 2-way communication with your Twitter followers
Like any other Social Network, Twitter provides two-way communication. So with everything that you post on Twitter, your audience is bound to react to it, and they will let you know about it in the replies.
This is an excellent opportunity for businesses to do a variety of things like
- Run promotional campaigns
- Opinion Polls
- Push out educational content
- Let your audience know about your company culture
Use Publishing feature of Statusbrew to efficiently manage campaigns, and schedule the posts ahead of time.
Posting this kind of content will encourage active participation from your audience with your brand.
You can extensively experiment with lots of types of content and see what works for your audience. The content should always aim to invoke emotion and response from your audience.
This way you will be able to understand how your audience thinks and reacts.
You can ask for feedback from your customers and maybe even convert angry customers to happy ones. You can push out content related to your product, discount offers and much more.
4. Conversation on Twitter is in real time
Just like talking to your friends on your cell phone, Twitter lets you have an open conversation with your prospects and leads. This is one of the most significant benefits of using Twitter for your business.
Instead of exchanging emails with your customers over weeks, Twitter allows you to talk to your customers in real time and interact with them, there and then.
In context to customer support, this can be a massive plus in terms of solving issues for your customers. This definitely will help you in improving customer satisfaction as you will be able to solve problems within minutes as opposed to taking days in sending emails back and forth.
I wrote a blog about how to improve your customer service on Social Media. This should help you in understanding the best practices while doing customer support over Twitter.
As mentioned above, Statusbrew, SproutSocial and Hootsuite are great tools if you want to continually monitor the social chatter about your brand and use it to solve your customer’s queries.
Another way your business can use Twitter is to contribute to conversations that are meaningful for your business. It's an excellent opportunity to position yourself as a thought leader. Since the conversations are happening as you are watching them, you can contribute to these conversations and connect with like-minded people. Twitter chats are a great example of this.
5. Identifying and targeting customers is easy
If you still think about why you should use Twitter for your business, this point will give you more clarity!
Because of the openness of Twitter, customer identification and targeting is extremely easy.
You have everything at the ready, interests of people, their websites, their profile bios. It helps you develop context before approaching or even targeting your customers.
If you have a persona that you are targeting, you can search for almost any information about your customer that your persona actually has on Twitter.
Twitter ads allow you to choose from a different objective and provide you with a variety of demographic data to target your customers and make your ads based on the persona that you are targeting.
6. Drives traffic to your website
47% of the people that visit a Twitter profile, also visit the website linked to that profile.
Amazing, right?
Talking about us, 40% of our website traffic comes from Twitter; this is how great Twitter can be for driving traffic to your business.
Related: Find more social media statistics in this blog
Apart from the links that you will put in your bio, you can continuously share links to your blogs(not spamming) which will drive people to go to your website. If you keep on sharing new and engaging content, you will position yourself as a credible source of information which will get you loyal readers for your blog.
To share your content or curated content, you can always rely on Social Media Management tools like:
If you want to find which topics to write on or which type of content to share, you can always trust Buzzsumo for finding you the best and shareable content.
Related: Here is your guide on How to Curate Content to Achieve Brand Loyalty.
7. It is one of the best platforms for customer support
What do you do when your best friend needs your help? You call them (with the same cell phone that you purchased) because that's the fastest way you can get in touch with them and solve their problem.
Because everything on Twitter happens in real time, having your presence, there is an excellent asset in terms of handling customer support.
Unlike other platforms where you have to open different chat windows to talk to different customers, on Twitter, you have a constant feed dedicated to just your customer's queries. This allows your customer support team to be very efficient in prioritizing which queries to reply first and develop context before you actually reply to them.
By using Statusbrew's Social Inbox, you can considerably cut down your response time for your customers who are facing any issues.
8. It is heaven for marketers
Twitter has an abundance of data about customers which your marketing team can easily access and capitalize on that. It can be a great asset in making targeted ads for different objectives like increasing downloads, increasing website visits, etc.
Twitter has everything that marketers wanted in a Social Network. Because of its openness, you can strike up a conversation with anyone and view their profile and see if they fit into your persona of an ideal customer.
Your team can have insight into how your activities are affecting your business ROI through Twitter analytics. What's more, is that you can even predict some trends related to your business and already start engaging with your followers on Twitter.
Related: 5 Hacks To Grow Your Twitter Followers
We even made a video about it for you.
9. Expanding your market reach is easy
With a cell phone, you can virtually call anyone and talk about anything.
Similarly, with every new product that you release, you will have a new set of customers that will use it, and you can find those customers on Twitter. What’s the best thing about it is that you can connect with them without having to wait for them to see you.
With posting good content consistently, you can increase the reach of your content which gets more eyes on your content whom you can convert to loyal customers and evangelists for your business.
One other way is through Influencer Marketing. Now because it is easy to connect with people on Twitter, you initiate conversations with influencers, with the same ease. But be careful about how you approach an influencer, there is a lot that goes into that before you actually send out your first Tweet. Here, I wrote about it:
How to use Influencer Marketing to increase visits to your blog
10. Numbers don’t lie
Enough talking. Let’s see what the numbers tell us:
- 65.8% of the companies are already using Twitter to promote their business
- There are an estimated 1.3 billion people registered on Twitter
- 74% of 2013 Inc 500 companies use Twitter
- 377 of the 2013 Fortune 500 companies have a corporate Twitter account
- Almost all of your competitors are there. You should be too!
How to use Twitter for marketing your business?
As now you have got all the answers to why you should use Twitter for your business you will also want to know how you can use Twitter for marketing your business.
Here is a comprehensive Twitter marketing guide for you. In case you're simply beginning with Twitter, this Twitter marketing guide will show you how to craft a winning Twitter marketing strategy.
Wrapping up!
So don't forget, just like the phone you have in your pocket or the phone that you are reading this article right now, you need to have a presence on Twitter and start getting active on the platform because, well I told you the 10 benefits of using Twitter.
If you feel that there is anything I missed, I would be more than happy to talk with you in the comments, or we can have this conversation on Twitter.
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