How to make Twitter work for your business

Twitter has been going strong for ten years now so it’s probably not going anywhere anytime soon. That means you should probably start thinking about using the social media platform for your business, if you don’t already.

Whether you already use Twitter for your business or the idea of taking your business on to social media terrifies you, these tips will make sure Twitter is as effective as possible for your business.

Set up your Twitter account properly

Your Twitter account needs to be an extension of your brand. Choose a Twitter handle that is either the name of your business or related to what you do, upload your logo to be used as the profile picture, and write a short summary of what your business does for the account bio.

Use Twitter as part of your customer service

People are using Twitter more and more to vent their frustrations of poor quality service received from businesses. If you see any negative comments from customers about your business, reply to them and try to fix their problem.

Remember, Twitter is a public arena, and showing people that you have great customer services is a good advert for you. If you don’t want to mix up your customer service with regular tweets you could set up a second Twitter account dedicated to only customer service.

Always be polite and respectful

However much you think your business is better than your competition, you will just look petty if you use your social media accounts to throw around insults. Always keep the language of your Tweets clean and friendly.

Use Twitter to hold competitions

One way you can use Twitter to get some attention, and some extra followers, is by having competitions. The prize is up to you, but best make it something related to your business, like a free product or service. One of the common types of Twitter competitions is asking people to follow you and then retweet your tweet announcing the competition – your tweet, and your brand, then gets in front of the people who follow those who retweet you. You can then pick a winner randomly from the people who follow and retweet you.

Don’t just go on and on about your business

It’s fine to talk about your business, and why you think you provide a great product or service, but if that’s all you do people will tune out and unfollow you. One of the good things about Twitter is that you get to have personal, meaningful conversations with people – use this to your advantage and show people how friendly and personal your business is.

Check your analytics

You should use analytics tools to work out the best strategies for using Twitter, trying to find the sort of posts that get you noticed. Twitter gives its own basic but useful analytics tool, but there are more advanced tools out there too.