Using Twitter as a marketing tool for your company is a strategy that’s still getting mixed reviews. Many say that the Twitter user’s natural aversion to commercialism on that channel make it too difficult to achieve any meaningful results. But at the end of the day, that hasn’t really stopped companies from trying.
Many brands have found success using Twitter, and this is partly because they’ve gotten past using Twitter for direct marketing. Well, in many cases, it’s more like they gave up after meeting a brick wall of resistance.
Twitter can be an effective way of building the image of your brand and improving your reputation. True, that can’t quantified or really accounted for at financial year end, but making your consumer driven company seem less like a faceless corporation can certainly go in the ‘win’ column.
Some things to consider when promoting your brand on Twitter:
The Personal Touch
Twitter is a touchpoint like any other communication channel, so make it a personal experience. A user may respect a company but they want to deal with a human being. This can be achieved as easily as using ‘I’ and ‘me’ rather than the collective ‘we’ and ‘us’. Not taking yourself too seriously can also help as followers will become more comfortable with you.
Never use message templates or automates response messages when replying to a user. These are normally quite transparent and will have the opposite effect from what you intended.
Stay Engaged and Genuine
The only way your brand is going to get any attention and get its head above the rest of the competition, is if you stay at it. On Facebook this can mean posting a status every few days or so and perhaps sharing some content, but on twitter this can entail an average of 15 tweets daily (be those in reply to other tweets or just as general posts). Keep it smart though, don’t just tweet to fill the silence.
When making use of such functions as share, retweet and hashtags, make sure not to go crazy. You may be eager to get your content to as many people as possible but trying too hard has traditionally, never really been a successful strategy, socially speaking.
Only Tweet If It Adds Value
Yes, you should be active in the Twitter community but don’t tweet unless you have something to say And don’t always say the same thing. i.e. Don’t just use Twitter to promote your company and publicise special offers.
As I mentioned above, this a chance for you to interact with the consumer. Don’t waste it just advertising to them. Share content that you think your followers would find interesting and that isn’t necessarily connected your company.
This isn’t to say you can’t advertise, just keep it balanced. Otherwise you might end up alienating your followers.
Have Authority
This relates directly to how you tweet and how your brand’s profile is put together. Using poor grammar, misspelling words or generally inane tweets will damage your credibility as company. Yes you making your brand human, but you should come across as a competent one.
You have quite broad design options on your Twitter account, so make use of them. Remember, Twitter is completely open so if you profile has the standard design, no profile picture and very little or seemingly arbitrary photos, people think it’s not an official account and won’t trust it. And if they do think it’s the official account, they’ll lose respect for a company that can’t even put together a proper Twitter profile.