Some marketers and business owners are in denial that they need to take on new technology and do social media. However, this post is not here to convince those who are still stuck in the shadow of a prehistoric velociraptor. If you’re just starting to get into some social media, maybe you’ve done some Facebook marketing or Youtube and are thinking of branching out. Or maybe you started tweeting and have no idea why. Either way you’re being proactive about it so I will try to help you out. Here’s a short list of how Twitter will help you accelerate your business from a Ford Taurus to a Ferrari Enzo

1. Customer Service – This is a broad topic that could be a couple of points, but let’s keep it here for simplicity in this post. Twitter is great for monitoring your customers engagement, responses, and reactions in real time with your brand. It has searching capabilities that are extremely straight forward and you can find out if customers have issues with your products instantly. Or maybe they’re sharing their love for your service with their followers, and you can engage them directly to thank or address issues. Click here to read an awesome blog post on how other businesses do great customer service on Twitter.
2. Promotions – Twitter is a broadcast and advertising-like medium that lends itself well to sharing promotions with your customers. Not simply just advertising the same old same old, but real promotions. You want to give them extra value for being your follower on Twitter. They did you the service of following so you should reciprocate by rewarding them with better treatment than a regular customer. Free, 20% off, BOGO, Event promo, whatever it is make it truly valuable for your customers to involve themselves with your brand on Twitter.
3. Utility – Being a resource for potential customers is one of the best ways to create value for your followers. There’s two ways of doing this, the slightly easier way of being a curator and searching out valuable information or tools that your customers would WANT to read or use, and Twitter will be your way to share links and info about those resources. And the more time consuming way of being the content creator. So if you have a blog or website with value to be shared with your customers then share those links to your Twitter followers.
4. Connections – Creating a place for your customers to talk to one another around a certain topic can be the start of a buzz so loud you wish you had ear plugs. Hashtags are great for organizing community in Twitter. If you have a promotion, event, news, or product you want your audience to connect around create a distinguishable hashtag like #twitter4biz so everyone can be in on the same conversation. B2B connections can also be really powerful in helping your business to find new information, suppliers, or employees in your industry.
5. Entertainment – Depending on your product or service, and the culture you want to share, maybe your Twitter strategy will be entertainment for your followers. This is generally the default setting most marketers put themselves on because they see the big time Oreo’s and Coca-Cola’s trying to be funny. I would suggest making this a small part of your strategy, and just input nuggets of humour or entertainment instead of it taking over your overall strategy.

The biggest take away here is that you can’t expect your customers to be truly excited about you as a brand. You’re not Justin Bieber. Simply sharing news updates about what your business is doing or eating for lunch will not likely get you far unless you already have a following outside of social media and your customers seek to find out what’s new. So plan to create value for your audience. Give them something they didn’t expect, then give more.

Joel Harrison