SON SON
By Kyle Lacy
Wiley Publishing, Inc| English | 315 pages | PDF | 8.450 KB | Download | Password: itweet
This idea of communicating on the Internet is continually evolving, and with Twitter, you have the opportunity to reach millions of people in a matter of seconds. The future of online communication is rendering business owners lifeless because of how slow they are to adopt new technology for communication. What if your customers stopped using the phone and moved somewhere else? Would you be ready? Twitter life, and the rest just details? Not exactly, but Twitter can help you create a sustainable communication model to drive more leads, revenue, and customer evangelists to your product. And the best part is, you don’t have to spend countless hours researching how to use Twitter to market your products.
Imagine a world in which millions upon millions of potential customers are talking, sharing ideas, and shaping new realms of communication. This new online platform has blasted through traditional marketing and communication concepts and created a world in which collaboration and customers are king. This world exists as Twitter (www.twitter.com).
Twitter has exploded, with growth rates of 1,382% year-over-year and over 6 million members as of this writing. All those Twitter users are potentially waiting for you to communicate with them. When you start using Twitter for your business, you’re entering a new phase of Internet marketing in which you discuss your brand on a daily basis and send out your thoughts in bursts of 140 characters or less. You’re on the leading edge of a communication and cultural transformation in the business landscape of the world. Isn’t this exciting? Twitter has disrupted the traditional marketing process and placed the customer in control of the marketing message.
But don’t fret! The future of marketing is bright never before have had you had such possibilities for growing your business. Twitter enables you to find potential customers quickly and easily and communicate with them with only a few keystrokes. Twitter is built on the concept of micro-blogging, in which people write short, frequent posts (often by using a cell phone) that don’t exceed 140 characters. Those 140-character posts are known as tweets.
Tweets are a form of micro-blogging that have enabled users to share massive amounts of content in the form of short text messages that they send to unique sets of people or entire groups. Twitter is one of the original platforms for micro-blogging, and it has ruled this space since its creation in 2006. Micro-blogging has increased the speed of information ten-fold, in contrast to writing a blog post or writing an in-depth consumer report.
Blogging is a more elaborate approach to information sharing and marketing on the Web. Micro-blogging is a short-term approach that’s ideal for quick and thoughtful communication. Blogging and micro-blogging should work hand-inhand to create a platform that you can use to spread your business ideas to your customers and potential market. When you follow somebody on Twitter, his or her tweets appear on your Twitter timeline (much like you can see your friends’ status updates on your Facebook feed). The big difference between Twitter and Facebook is that you don’t need other people’s approval before you can follow them on Twitter, as long as they’ve set their Twitter accounts to public status.
Being followed on Twitter has very little to do with being followed in real life, when you feel like someone is shadowing your every move. Every time you post a tweet, it appears on the Twitter timeline of all the people who are following you. If you’re posting on Twitter as a business, you need followers on Twitter so that you can get your message out about your company, products, and services. Twitter also gives you the ability to have conversations with current and potential clients. So, you just need to follow as many people as possible and start tweeting about your products like there’s no tomorrow, right? Not so fast. You need to have a plan, a strategy to make the most of Twitter, before you start following a bunch of people (or tweeple, as they’re sometimes called in the Twitterverse).
When you start following others on Twitter, you need to share useful information with them so that they want to follow you, too. The information that your followers are interested in may vary, depending on their focus and interests. But they’re probably not dying to read a ton of tweets in a row in which you praise your products and services: If you take that approach, prepare to be unfollowed massively on Twitter. You need to strike a balance between your marketing message (naturally, you want to promote your company, products, and services otherwise, you wouldn’t be reading this book), useful information about your industry, and some personal elements to give people a feel for the human side of your company. Along with all these elements, you also need to share useful tweets that others post on Twitter. Sending your followers a tweet that you’ve received is called retweeting, and it’s considered part of the social currency on Twitter.
You can use Twitter as a valuable marketing tool for your business, whether you have a small, medium-sized, or large business. Also, Twitter can help complement your company’s current PR and customer service efforts. The following sections describe several ways that you can use Twitter for your business. Because Twitter gives you the ability to share 140-character thoughts in a split second, you can easily share links to PR releases and stories about your business, service, or product. But in order to make your tweets interesting and diverse so that you can hold on to and increase your followers, consider sharing news and stories about the industry that you serve. You can become a reference for people who are looking for information about the topic, and that status can ultimately gain you more followers who may become your customers.
You can also branch out into general news stories, keeping an eye on trending topics on Twitter, tweeting about more than just your business and industry can help show the human side of your company; however, depending on what your Twitter marketing strategy is, keep your brand in mind when you use Twitter and consider what your tweets say about your brand as a whole. Make sure that you enhance and complement your brand’s story through your tweets. Twitter gives you the ability to take a single thought and share it with millions of people. And your customer evangelists can spread your message, as well as their opinions about your company’s greatness, to as many people as possible.
Your evangelists can help you get your message out, but you must first find out who they are and remember to give to them (by retweeting their interesting messages) before you ask for their support. You can spot your fans and evangelists by keeping an eye on who retweets your posts most often. some tools that can help you track that information. Also, monitor Twitter trends in your industry so that you can spot the people you need to be listening to. Through a disciplined balance between listening to others and retweeting their useful contributions, eventually you earn the right to ask for their support in return. The reward may be as big as having your brand story go viral and getting picked up by thousands or millions of potential customers.