5 Reasons to Use Twitter to Market Your Business

Your Dream Business

English - June 03, 2018 22:34 - 15 minutes - 15.1 MB - ★★★★★ - 34 ratings
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Previous Episode: Facebook Algorithms Explained: How to Post Better, Get More Engagement & Improve Your Reach

Next Episode: The Business of Social Media Management: 5 Common Misconceptions and Tips

KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCASTTwitter is still growing and has a considerable number of followers. It has 300 million active monthly users worldwide.Twitter offers a variety of media for your content. You can write posts, put up images, use GIFs and videos. You can also stream live using Twitter.Bots and spammers are no longer able to contribute using Twitter due to new rules on the platform. This creates a better stage for your content.Hashtags are used on Twitter to organize conversations. Trending hashtags can be followed by viewers.Following, retweeting and commenting on your follower’s updates creates notifications for them. This helps you get the conversation started between you and your audience.Do you have 100 Twitter followers? You could be retweeted by someone with 500 or more followers. This creates a larger audience for you!Always respond when someone starts a conversation with you. This is critical for keeping the conversation going between you and your audience.
THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…Social media is just as personal as face-to-face contact. Don’t discount social media as being just another tool to learn on a computer screen. Instead, use social media to create relationships with those who you may not have met otherwise. And lean into Twitter, which I firmly believe is the best tool to use to make connections and start conversations.HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN'T MISSReason #1: Twitter is still growing! – 04:34Reason #2: Twitter is more than just words – 05:35Reason #3: Twitter is a trend-setter – 07:40Reason #4: Twitter is the one of the most powerful engagement tools available – 08:39Reason #5: You can get in front of a large audience via Twitter! – 11:55
Transcript below

Hello there and thank you for joining me for episode number 15 of the Social Media Marketing Made Simple Podcast. And I am your host, Teresa Heath-Wareing.

As always, I am ready to share some tips, tools, tricks, strategies with you on how you can improve your social media marketing for your business. So whether you are a business owner, entrepreneur or a social media marketing person and you are looking for more some more tips and tricks in order to get more engagement, drive more traffic and ultimately to use social media to help you sell your products or service, then you are in the right place, my friend, and I am here to help you.

One of the things I love about social media more than anything is the fact that it can bring you together with people that you may not have known, or they may not know about your products or service. And you're able to have conversations with them.

I think I've mentioned before that I started marketing 14 years ago. And when I was doing marketing then, there was no two-way conversation. If we wanted to find out about a customer or what they liked or what they didn't like, it was a huge effort. It would be using things like focus groups, questionnaires, picking up the phone and speaking to people. Things that were a lot of hard work and also cost a lot of money, just to find out about your customer.

Now, the way the world has gone with social media and with everything being so digital, is that people think the world has become more and more distant. That we're just talking to screens. Just looking at phones. Just doing everything on our computer. And you're losing the personal side of marketing and selling. But actually, that's not the case at all. If you look at the really successful marketers, they are the people who are getting to know their customers. And not just getting to know them, i.e., what age they are, whether they're male or female. I mean getting really under the skin of these people. Asking them what they like, what they don't like....

Hello there and thank you for joining me for episode number 15 of the Social Media Marketing Made Simple Podcast. And I am your host, Teresa Heath-Wareing.

Also, as a business owner, I love the way that it got me in touch with other people. People that knew what I was going through. People that could help me with certain things. I've been able to make some connections that I still have today that I made purely through social media. It's really funny when you say, "How did you meet?" "We met via Twitter." It sounds a little bit odd. Or, I know them from Instagram. It sounds like they're not real people, but actually these connections are just as strong and just as powerful as the ones I met over a breakfast meeting in the early days.

So today I wanted to talk you through one of my favourite tools for connecting with people and engaging with people. Now, when I mention Twitter, people are gonna be like, "Oh, really?" So the reaction I get with Twitter every time is either they don't get it. They really don't get it. They've tried it, they don't understand it, they don't know how to make it work for them. Or, they think that this is an old social media platform that no one's using and actually it's going to die off tomorrow. Which isn't the case at all.

So today I am here to tell you how wonderful Twitter is and why you should still consider it as one of the profiles that you use to market your business. Twitter is entirely about engagement. If you're going to use Twitter to literally post and shout at the world, then absolutely it's not gonna do anything and it's gonna be a big waste of your time. But, if you are in the business to business arena ... Now, it's not to say that business to consumer doesn't work. However, it's particularly effective for business to business people. Then if you're in that arena and you want to make real connections and speak to real people and start to build up a relationship with people, then actually Twitter is a fantastic way to go about it.

And one of the great things about Twitter is it's so uninvasive. It's so relaxed as an approach that it doesn't feel salesy whatsoever. As long as you treat it that way. But I'm here today to tell you the five things that I love about Twitter and why you should use it.

Reason #1: Twitter is still growing!

Reason one. Now this is gonna surprise you, I'm sure, but Twitter is still growing. It still continues to grow and has done for a long time. So even though it might not grow at the speed of the others and it might not have as many users or followers as the others, it is still growing and it still has a considerable amount of followers. Worldwide, Twitter has on average 300 million monthly active users. Now that's a fairly big pond of people to go at if you're looking to connect with people.

Also, the other thing that you might not know about Twitter is often they come out with the really cool ideas first. But I think, personally, this is my opinion, but I think that as a company they probably don't have the money that Facebook has. Therefore, Facebook will see something inventive that Twitter's done, like the fact that they did live streaming first. Then, they do it so much better. And that's why Twitter sometimes gets left in the dust when you look at how good some of the platforms are.

Reason #2: Twitter is more than just words

Reason two. You can use a range of medias on Twitter. So obviously all the different social medias have their own kind of thing. i.e., Instagram is all about images. YouTube is all video. Twitter actually offers a range of medias in which you can put out your content. So, they've obviously now increased the word count so you can have a lot more words, which helps. But unless you're going to write really long posts, then Twitter can be perfect for you. You can write posts. You can put up images. You can use GIFs. In fact, they were one of the first to bring in GIFs. Like I said, another first for Twitter. And you can use videos and upload native videos to Twitter.

The other thing that you can also do is you can stream live from Twitter and straight into the platform. The other cool feature that it has on the app on your phone is that there's a recording element where you can record yourself making a video and you can almost edit that video by chopping bits out or changing the order of certain things. So Twitter from a media point of view is great. It really is an all-rounder, like Facebook, where you can really use lots of different ways in which to promote your content.

Also, I know that one of the downsides of Twitter is that it moved so fast. There was so much content on there that your post would barely be shown for minutes before it disappeared into the timeline. And therefore, it was a really crowded place to be. Now recently, Twitter have changed their rules around posting and you can no longer post the same post with the same image multiple times, which you could do previously. And I think what this has done for Twitter is it's cleaned up a bit. And it's also given a little bit of air to breathe so that all those bots and spammers that were out there literally chucking out the same content every five seconds, so it felt, are now no longer on there. And therefore, you are able to be heard a little bit more.

Reason #3: Twitter is a trend-setter

Reason three is that Twitter is often at the forefront of any breaking news. It trends new stories and things get put out on Twitter before they get seen pretty much anywhere else. And they still have this today. Even though the other social media platforms have grown, it still appears that Twitter has this kind of hold on the news and its world when something big goes on. Which means they are still really powerful when it comes to trending hashtags. So obviously, just in case you aren't sure about hashtags and what they mean, all it means is when you're having a conversation about a particular subject, if you use the hashtag, then other people having that same conversation are going to be able to see what you say and also get involved in that conversation with you. So what happens on Twitter is when lots of people are talking about a particular subject using a hashtag, they then start trending. And people then start following that trending news.

Reason #4: Twitter is the one of the most powerful engagement tools available

Reason four. Twitter was probably the original and still one of the most powerful engagement tools that there are out there. One of the things that frustrates me about Facebook is that it's so hard to build a connection with people. You can't go out and reach out to people and have conversations with them. As a business page, you can't just go and comment on a personal profile or someone's status update. So it's really difficult to start those conversations and to make those connections.

However, on Twitter, it is exactly what it's built for. What we tend to do is if we want to make a connection with someone over Twitter, is we'll start by following that account. So every time you connect with them, like following them, you appear in their notifications. And that is one place that shouldn't be really, really noisy. They should be able to see their notifications and it's not like you're in a timeline with all the other content. You will appear. They will get notified that you've done something.

So like I said, the first thing we would do is we go and follow them. The second thing we might do is we might retweet some of their things or we might like some of their posts or we might comment on some of their posts. And that way, every single time we do one of those things, again, they get notified. This certain account has gone and liked or retweeted or commented on their post.

Now because obviously the whole idea of social media is that you want to get your message heard, you want people to respond, you want people to comment, people are normally pretty positive about the fact of you doing it. As long as you're again, not trying to be salesy or be really direct with them, then people are normally really positive and really happy to receive that interaction and engagement.

So, like I said, every time we do something like that, every time we retweet them, we are a, not only helping them because we are getting their message out to more and more people, but b, we are appearing in their notifications.

And then, what's best of all, is that if we want to talk directly to them, we can literally tag their account into a tweet. So we can use their Twitter handle, which is their name that they use on Twitter. We can use their Twitter handle and we can actually say something to them. So we can start off by just having an average conversation.

And funnily enough, when I was in San Diego back in February for Social Media Marketing World and Traffic & Conversion, this was the main thing. It was all about conversations and starting conversations with customers. Not trying to sell to them. Not trying to get anything from them. Just starting a conversation. And then, you can use that conversation as an opportunity, and that opportunity can then possibly create a conversion.

The other good thing about this engagement side of Twitter is that if you're thinking you have to do so many posts a day, well actually conversations are posts as well. Every time you reply to someone, every time you talk to someone, every time you have any type of conversation with someone, you are going to appear back in the news feed for people to see your logo or your profile or whatever it might be. So these conversations can be really useful in terms of you building your profile on Twitter as well.

Reason #5: You can get in front of a large audience via Twitter!

Reason five. The opportunity to get in front of a large audience is really high with Twitter. One of the things that I love about Twitter is the fact that if you, say, have 100 people that follow you and one of your followers sees your tweet and retweets it but they have 500 followers, then you've suddenly gone from having a potential of 100 people seeing it to a potential of 600 people seeing it.

And then let's say someone else sees it and they retweet it and they have 10,000 followers, then every time this happens, it's like it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And the opportunity to have your tweet put in front of people is massive.

Also, the Twitter community are a really lovely community. Certainly the ones that are in my community. And they're so kind, that if you ask them to retweet something, they often will retweet it. So calls to action on Twitter are really, really effective. If you ask people to follow you, if you ask people to retweet your tweet, then they are very helpful and they will usually do that.

I know that this was a really quick whistle-stop tour around some of the things that I love about Twitter. But I really am quite passionate about it. Even though I am investing a huge amount of time at the moment on Instagram, and I do love Instagram because I love all the images, but for me Twitter is where I know I can go back to and have a conversation and people will start a conversation back with you. I know that they are loyal and interested in what you have to say. As long as that is that you are the same back to them.

One of the really crucial things about Twitter is that if someone goes to the effort to speak to you, like with any social media, you really, really, really must respond. And when people know that you respond and that you have conversations with them, they will continue those conversations. And therefore, the next time you post something out, suddenly you'll find lots of people start retweeting that. Because they have become part of your community and are willing to help you where they can.

Also, I know that Twitter can seem a little bit strange in terms of how you manage it, how you keep up with what's happening. So some people can get a bit frustrated with it or just take one look and think, "This isn't for me." But I urge you to try again and I urge you to take a look and see if you can just start connecting with some people, even in the local area. Just start commenting on some of their things and just wait for the responses to come in. Because I promise you, they will come.

Thank you so much for listening. I really do appreciate it. And of course, if you are on Twitter, then please type in Teresa Heath-Wareing and you will find me. I would love it if you could come and tweet me and say hi. And I will definitely say hi back. Have a great week. And until next time, take care.