A Comprehensive Guide to Twitter For Small Businesses in 2019

A Comprehensive Guide to Twitter For Small Businesses in 2019

Posted on by Mohamed Adel
Category:Social Media
Tagged, ,

Note: This blog post has been updated on 5th December, 2018.

Being a small 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 a small business owner and planning to use Twitter for your business, then you would definitely be struggling with these questions:

  • Is Twitter useful for your small business?
  • What are the goals of Twitter Marketing?
  • How Twitter Can help small business?
  • What are the reasons to use Twitter for your small business?

Considering all these questions that we encounter from small business owners. We decided to write a comprehensive Twitter guide for small businesses. Thus, if you are a small business owner and want to promote your business effectively on Twitter, then you should check out this ultimate Twitter Guide for small businesses in 2019.

But before moving ahead, let’s try to answer all these questions

Is Twitter useful for Small Business?

With more than 300 million active users, it is a great platform for businesses to reach & get connected with the new audience. And, over time, small businesses have realized the power of this platform. It is a great platform for small business to effectively communicate with their fans & customers. Small businesses have been using Twitter to grow their business. Another reason that encourages small businesses to promote their product or service on Twitter is that it costs a very little to promote a product on this platform. Therefore, small businesses should definitely explore twitter to promote their products.

What are the Goals of Twitter Marketing?

Before proceeding ahead with marketing your small business on Twitter, you must decide what are the goals that you want to achieve from promoting your business on Twitter. The common Twitter goals are:

  • Generate leads & sales
  • Increase Brand Awareness
  • Customer Support channel

Determining Twitter marketing goal for your small business would help you evaluate your performance on this platform. So, it is immensely important to decide your goals.

How Twitter Can help small business?

Here are a few points that emphasize why Twitter is important for small business marketing.

Connect to Customers: Twitter is rapidly growing. Every day, the size of the Twitter audience is growing. It provides a great opportunity for small businesses to look for potential customers. Not just, it offers them the opportunity to find new customers but also connect with the existing customers and interact with them to discover the image of their brand in existing customers and resolves their customer’s problem.

Increase Brand Awareness: Being a small business owner, it becomes important for you 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.

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, so 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 marketing strategy and provide inputs to improve your product or services.

But why Twitter?

If you are still confused about why should you use Twitter to grow your business, then go through the following 10 points.

10 Reasons Why You Should Use Twitter For Business

  1. Twitter Marketing is the Social Currency
  2. It Is Open
  3. It is not a Broadcast Medium
  4. Conversation on Twitter is real time
  5. Identifying and Targeting Customers is easy
  6. To drive Traffic to your website
  7. It is one of the best platforms for Customer Support
  8. It is Heaven for marketers
  9. Expanding your market reach is easy
  10. 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 that they share with others that makes them seem cool. Like an amazing 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 on Twitter, you are already behind.

You both have bragging rights. You, because you are able to connect with your customers easily and drive more leads in to 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

If you still remember the cell phone analogy, ponder on that for a moment. Wouldn’t it be great if you could hear every conversation that your friends have with their friends?

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 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, how do I find

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:

  • Statusbrew: You can search for profiles that are tweeting about a particular hashtag and you can also see their recent Tweets. With Statusbrew’s source feature, you can compare your current audience with the kind of audience that is talking about the keywords that you are targeting.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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 have a reaction to it and they will let you know about it in the replies.

This is a great opportunity for businesses like yours to do a variety of things like

  • Run promotional campaigns
  • Opinion Polls
  • Push out educational content
  • Let your audience know about your company culture

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.

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 huge 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, SproutSocial and Hootsuite are great tools if you want to constantly 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

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. To Drive 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.

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 automation 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.

7. It is one of the best platforms for Customer Support

What do you do when you 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 a great asset in terms of handling customer support.

Unlike other platforms where you have to open different chat windows to talk to different customers, in Twitter, you have a steady 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 them.

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 about 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.

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 find 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:

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 reasons.

 

Source: https://blog.statusbrew.com/why-use-twitter-for-business/

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