Twitter for Business…Getting Results

We’ve posted about Twitter many a time on Online PR UK but the questions I receive are all the same. Are you one of those people that open Twitter in the morning to see if you’ve had any mentions, RTs etc RT a couple of tweets yourself and post up your own PR tweet of the day?

Thought so.

Stop. Lets think like England did in the EURO2012 against Italy. (Kind of). GOALS GOALS GOALS.

What do you want out of this? what does your business need?

1. Increase sales?

2. Increase subscribers to newsletter/database

3. Promote community engagement?

4. Improve awareness to website?

5. Gather customer feedback?

These are all tangible so worth taking the time to do it right. So popping by Twitter every morning to post, willy nilly is not that useful in the long run. This is not about you ego, its about bread and butter. Its not about being ‘down with the kids’ its about the welfare of your business.

Imagine you are a chef and to get your Twitter marketing dish tasting perfect, all the ingredients need to be there.

The first ingredient is to accumulate. Gather the people that matter to your business.

Now we all know how tricky it is to get heard online through all the competition and depending on what you want out of this whole mission, your database needs to be the ultimate goal here. A business is nothing without one, so think collecting  emails and twitter addresses for instant connection.  There are companies that generate data for you with just an email address and this could be handy as you want to know your customer as intimately as possible. Ahem.  For reasons all above board of course.  This way, when you create fantastic tweets the right people are seeing them and will share them and retweet them. Unlike the 1000 followers you have just bought for £20 to make you look better and whom you will have no engagement with. You get the picture.

The third ingredient is capturing. Capturing information adds value to your business. Have you thought about getting something like this on the front page of your site? Eventually you will have a large juicy list of peoples names, emails and social media identities.

The fourth ingredient is patience. Remember hungry marketers, not every capture is a lead and not every lead means sales. So no getting narked when the person you have been working on for ages falls through the net. Social media doesn’t work that way.

The last ingredient is method. The way in which we ‘capture’ leads is through listening, creating great content, offering great information, being innovative, controversial and fun and of course, understanding WHO you are dealing with.

Go forth and multiply. Safely please.

#onlinemarketing #OnlinePRandMarketing #SocialMedia #Twitter