Quick Win Twitter for businesses

www.evonomie.net

Twitter is about answering the question ‘what are you doing’ in less than 140 characters. That’s about 12 words. This presentation looks at quick wins in how to get started with Twitter.

Twitter jargon buster

• Tweet – a post, message or update on Twitter • @username + message – an open tweet that

can be seen by your followers and by @username’s followers

• DM username –a private tweet that can only be seen by username

• #hashtag- a Twitter keyword. Adding # makes the word searchable.

• RT – repeating a Tweet, known as a ReTweet

Decide your objectives

• Promote key messages• Build brand awareness• Drive traffic to your

website• Promote special offers• Respond to customer

queries• Provide advice and tips

• Share news• Build community• Raise funds• Generate sponsorship• Customer services• Product demos• Recruit new staff• Research your market

Agree your identity – business or personal?

If your objective is to generate business, it’s better to adopt a business identity.

If you have several people inside your company who will tweet, a common format needs to be agreed, such as Evonomie_Jo. This enables followers to know that this is a company tweet, but the individual is identifiable. One of the challenges with Twitter is that user names arelimited to 15 characters.

• If your company name is longer, you may need to think carefully about how to present your brand.

• Once you have agreed your Twitter identity, don’t change it as you could lose and confuse followers.

Protect your brand

Twitter and other social media requires a square logo. If you have a rectangular logo and upload to Twitter, it will crop the sides, damaging your visual identity.

Get your designer to prepare ‘social media ready’ logos that are sized for Twitter at 700k.

Your Twitter ID

One of the challenges with Twitter is that user names are limited to 15 characters.

• Add a photo to distinguish you from those using the default Twitter bird.

• Once your brand is established, don’t change the visual identity or your photo without good reason!

• Register new brands early. If someone else is using your brand

name you can apply to Twitter to get the account suspended and eventually transferred but this does take a long time.

Prepare your bio

Your bio or biography is 160 characters about you or your company.

• It is searchable.

• Your bio can be read by followers and non followers alike so ensure that it reflects your Twitter objectives.

• Focus on a few essential keywords as a bio is the first place potential followers review.

• If the identity is for a company make sure this follows your normal brand rules.

• If it’s a personal bio, check that it doesn’t infringe any company brand guidelines.

Agree update responsibility

There are 90 million Twitter accounts but only 18 million are active. Twitter considers an account as inactive if it hasn't been logged into or updated in over 6 months. These accounts may be automatically removed from Twitter.

Make sure that• the account is updated• in line with your objectives

Twitter management

Updating Twitter is best done in house..

Ensure Twitter users are given clear guidelines on the company’s brand values and ‘tone of voice’. If you are a professional or business user and use LinkedIn, you can simply add Twitter to your LinkedIn account and when adding a ‘status update’ in LinkedIn, you can check the box to automatically tweet at the same time.

Organise landing pages

Your bio includes a web page link. Instead of sending all traffic to your home page, organise a separate page for your Twitter followers. This will enable

• Better analysis of how visitors found your web page.

• Your Twitter followers to get all the information they need about you, in more than 160 characters, in one place.

Use free software

Twitter.com is the most basic way to use Twitter. It doesn’t spell-check, allow you to schedule posts or to group your favourites. There are many great free software tools including

Application What it doesHootSuite Schedule Tweets over a period of time.Mr Tweet Makes recommendations on who to follow.TweetBeep Track who is mentioning you.Tweetburner URL shortening service for Twitter.Tweetdeck Makes Twitter easy to use.TweetMeme Finds stories from Twitter for you to retweet.Twitter Grader See how you rank on Twitter.Twittonary Twitter Dictionary.

Share the news

Once you have started tweeting, make sure your existing customers are aware. This helps to grow your follower base and to keep you ‘front of mind’. Make sure the Twitter logo and your @username are on your

• website• emails• business cards• blogs• LinkedIn profile

Get interactive

To make Twitter work and to achieve your objectives you need to invest some time to tweet. • Re-purpose (re-use) existing content • ReTweet interesting Tweets• Recommend interesting Tweeters – ‘Follow Friday’ #FF is set

up to do this• Tweet about useful and interesting information, sharing your

breakfast menu is not that fascinating – unless you own a Bed & Breakfast establishment!

• Tweet on a regular basis – this could be daily or weekly, but a Twitter account with few tweets won’t attract many followers.

Books and iPhone apps

We’ve adapted this from the books Quick Win Marketing and Quick Win Digital Marketing.

For answers to digital marketing questions see Quick Win Digital Marketing by Annmarie Hanlon and Joanna Akins (Book available from Oak Tree Press and App available from iTunes store).

Get some expert help

• Evonomie® is a social media consultancy. We help companies and agencies by analysing and developing their social media presence..

• We can recommend reputable SEO companies, website companies and graphic designers.

• Contact us www.evonomie.net • T 01543 258522