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Social media marketing 101: twitter

Home of the infamous 140-character posts, Twitter is a great way to get short snippets of information out within a matter of seconds.
While the limited amount of characters may not seem ideal for a business’ marketing strategy, there are tons of ways corporations can use Twitter to their advantage. Listed below are a few of the more common ways.

  1. Monitoring your brand. Ever wonder what people are saying about your business? Twitter is a great tool for monitoring your brand. Because hashtags are as common as punctuation these days, businesses are often able to see what people are saying about the brand and the business via social media. Although hashtags are now used on virtually every social network, the infamous trend had its beginnings on twitter. The most simplistic way to monitor your brand on twitter is to simply search for a specific hashtag. Most hashtags are just the name of the corporation. For example, for the cellular phone company Sprint, their hashtag would be #Sprint. By searching your hashtag you will be able to see every tweet that your company was mentioned in. This allows you to see exactly what people are saying about your company (both good and bad), and also allows you to address any issues in which the twitter user excepts a reply.
  2. Identifying your targeted network. Twitter is a great way to find people who are interested in the products or services in which your company provides. The social networking site allows you to search for certain topics of interests so that you can connect with people who have those same interests. In addition, Twitter also does a great job of compiling a list of users they suggests you connect with. Using the searchable hashtags can also help you to locate prospective clients and customers. For example, a retail clothing company may benefit from searching the hashtag “fashion” as a means to connect with users who may be interested in that topic.
  3. Sharing links & directing people to your website. This is perhaps the most advantageous feature for businesses on twitter. Sharing links to blogs you’ve written for your website, products and service descriptions, etc. is a great way to increase your website’s traffic. Because Twitter only allows you to post 140 characters at a time, adding a link to your post encourages curious readers to click on your link. When adding a link it is extremely important that you pair it with a call-to-action statement of some sort, so that your readers feel compelled to click it. Here is an example: “We’ve just added 5 yummy new recipes to our virtual cookbook! Take a look here: http://cookingisfun.com/virtualcookbook. “

There are several ways in which you can use Twitter to advance your business’ marketing efforts, however the most important element is frequency and uniqueness. Posting on Twitter at least several times each day is essential. This is mainly because Twitter is used as a conversational platform in which users are constantly talking back and forth. Be sure to take advantage of Twitter’s conversational nature by reaching out to your prospective customers and addressing any of their needs, questions, or concerns.

As a web development and web marketing firm, eComand Solutions provides social media marketing services that include Twitter as well as a host of other social media sites. For more information on our SMM services, give us a call at (314) 853-9235.