Twitter for Business: 11 Best Practices To Follow

Best Practices

Here are 11 best practices your business should follow when it comes to Twitter:

1. Decide on a business objective.

Image by Amy Dianna via Flickr

2. Develop a strategy and plan.

3. Build a community of followers that will benefit what you offer. Think quality over quantity.

4. Listen to what people are tweeting about your business.

5. Broadcast valuable content you have on your site/blog.

6. Engage with people who are tweeting you.

7. Be real and credible in your tweets.

8. Provide value to your followers. What can you today to provide value for your community of followers?

9. Measure results against a benchmark.

10. Use third party applications to save you time and money in using Twitter.

11. Have fun. Twitter is social.

Three Key Marketing Tactics To Use on Twitter

There is so much more going on in the world of marketing today. There are traditional media approaches such as TV, radio, print, direct mail and newspaper. There is Internet marketing with banner ads, display ads, search engine marketing, email, online videos, widgets, and more.

Now with social media networks, it's time to take that next step. With Twitter, you need to take one step beyond where you've ever been before. Don't be afraid. It's simple to understand. It's where your business needs to be an active participant.




There are essentially three marketing tactics to use on Tactics:

1. Listen

To listen with Twitter means that you are tracking what other users are saying in their tweets about your business. Now you can determine if your new product is getting positive or negative word-of-mouth, if your customer service is excellent or not, and even get an overall impression of what people think about your business. Wouldn’t it be great to know what your customers are saying about you? Wouldn't it be great to know what your customers are saying about your competition?

2. Broadcast

To broadcast are to send one sided tweets. Those are the messages that alert your followers to any information you believe is valuable for them. It can be a company press release or a link to an article on your blog or website. Twitter gives you a great opportunity to maximize the value of your content on your website by broadcasting.

3. Engage

To engage is to have a conversation with other users on Twitter. While we all know that salespeople think ABC means “always be closing,” it is different on Twitter. With Twitter, ABC means “always be conversing.” That is because the more you converse and engage with followers, the more potential you have to influence their decisions, at the right time with the right message.

You can do just one of these marketing tactics, two of them, or all of them. Ideally, you should be using all three of these tactics to fully take advantage of the power of Twitter.

Is Twitter Right For Your Business?

When I talk to marketing people who are not using Twitter, there are two general reactions:

One group says: "I know I should check it out, but I'm too busy to learn about it right now."

The second group states, "I've been to Twitter, and the question 'what are you doing" has nothing to do with my business. Who cares? Twitter is a waste of time."

I am here to tell you that Twitter is not a waste of your time!



Twitter is proven to be an effective marketing tool for business. When used the right way, Twitter can help you to sell products, improve customer service, conduct real-time research, build new partnerships, and much more.

Twitter is a free social networking service that lets users send and receive short text messages of up to 140 characters called tweets, in real-time using the web and mobile devices. It sounds so simple, and yet, it is the fastest growing social media site with over 23 million users, with an estimated 50 million by end of next year.

While Twitter adds another marketing tool to learn in your already complex set of media vehicles, it is one that you should consider. The reason is the following:

Twitter provides your business an opportunity to connect, converse and influence the behavior of consumers one-on-one at the right time with a tailored message. If you use Twitter the right way, these consumers can turn into your advocates. These conversations also have the potential to reach and influence thousands of other Twitter users who listen in.

Twitter works for business because you can:

1. Connect with consumers in a friendly, social, open environment

2. Converse with consumers with a message that answers their questions at the time they are making purchasing decisions about your products.

3. Bond with your customers so they become advocates of your products; there is no source of information more trusted than a friend.

Stop wondering if Twitter is right for your business because it is!