6 Ways to Use Twitter for Business

Twitter is an excellent social media marketing tool for online retailers and service providers. At the end of 2009 Twitter had just topped 75 million user accounts. Recent research conducted by Pingdom reports that it’s now serving more than 40 million tweets per day. That equals a lot of opportunity.

There are literally thousands of Twitter tools and tips you can adopt for business benefit. Here are just six suggestions for you.

1. Promote Your Business with Hashtags

Insert hashtags in tweets so they appear in search listings on specific topics. Hashtags are simply a number sign followed by a keyword or phrase, without a space between, ie. #laptops or #wireless.

Twitter users seeking information on the term in your hashtag will see your tweet in the search results. This helps drive online sales because the user is already looking for something and may be researching a product they plan on buying.

Use hashtags when tweeting about product specials, new product launches, general industry information, and more.

2. Build Lists to Provide a Service

Any Twitter user can create a list – to compile the tweets of a group of users – and feed this list to followers. By building relevant lists you can become a useful source of consumer information.

Lists are beneficial to both those being followed and the followers. Once you are “listed” your tweets are automatically fed to an entire group of people who have indicated their interest in the list topic.

Lists appear with the @ sign and creator’s username, followed by the topic, ie. @MissEcommerce/ecommerce. Anyone searching for information on e-commerce can instantly see this is relevant and they should check it out.

Rather than waiting for another user to add your profile to their list, start a list and follow others who tweet on the same topic. Ideally, you will add others who add value to your list by tweeting helpful information, but who are not directly competing with you by selling the same type of products or services.

3. Speak Your Customer’s Language

Offering a translated version of your e-commerce site increases the company’s reach, opening doors to new markets. Twitrans is an application that uses human translators to translate your tweet in minutes.

You just enter the English text and, within an hour, the new version is sent back to your Twitter account. You can have tweets translated to Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian or Spanish.

This tool makes it simple for businesses operating in any country to reach out to new markets with product launch announcements, special sales, and company information. Without the expense of hiring in-house bilingual staff, or outsourcing for the service.

4. Monitor the Situation

There’s a Twitter tracking tool called Monitter that you can use in a few different ways to benefit your business. It allows you to enter keywords or phrases that are immediately searched for within tweets, in real time.

For example, you can use it to monitor what (if anything) is being said about your business or brand by searching for references people have made to your name on Twitter.

You can also track #hashtags or use Monitter to hunt down potential customers. If you sell hair straighteners you could search ‘hair straighteners’ or ‘hair styling’ or the brand name of your competition. See what people are saying about it, and perhaps try to them onto your product/service instead.

5. Poll Your Followers

Do a quick bit of market research with StrawPoll: “tiny polls in 160 characters”. It’s really easy for your followers to vote, just by replying to you with the number that represents their answer. In our example, 1 = Yes and 2 = No.

You could find out your follower’s favourite product, or just utilise a poll to get some conversation/interaction started.

6. A Picture Paints a Thousand Words

Visual stimulation is a proven method for success when it comes to engaging people. Research by Harvard Business School professor Mikolaj Jan Piskorski – who has spent years studying users of online social networks (SN) – found a great deal of SN popularity can be credited to imagery.

Piskorski says, “Seventy percent of all actions are related to viewing pictures or viewing other people’s profiles.” It’s a socially accepted form of voyeurism which can be used to great effect.

TwitPic is one application you can use to get started. It hosts any photos you upload online, and posts them to your Twitter account as a tweet.

In Summary

Twitter is a proven social media marketing platform. Just remember the “social” aspect of social media marketing and do not simply load up an application that will tweet for you automatically. Increase your chance of success by ensuring that communication goes both ways.

Article contribution by M.L. Miller

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