What You Need to Know About Twitter for Business

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You must have heard a lot about using Twitter for business. But getting the most out of this extremely popular micro-blogging platform isn’t possible until you work according to a well-planned social media strategy, keep your target audience engaged and have a useful measurement system in place. Plenty of small and medium sized businesses utilize Twitter to grow their online presence and attract more customers. However, the success stories are very hard to come by.

If you’re a business owner looking to achieve success with Twitter marketing, given below are some of the most vital tips that you can use.

Begin With Asking Questions

Remember this – “Keep asking, and you’ll get it”. Before you start to use Twitter as a business promotion tool, you need to step into the shoes of your Twitter community. Unless and until you know the mindset of the community, the way they make their decisions and the views they have about your key competitors, you won’t be able to make the most of Twitter marketing.

Work Out A Strategy

The next step is to start planning an effective strategy in the light of the business goals you want to achieve. Using the Twitter platform without having a good strategy is like ‘shooting arrows in the dark’. Here’s what you need to do:

 - Define your target audience.
- Determine the goals that you want to achieve.
- Think about the kind of content you should post. [While tweeting, stick to your niche as much as possible.]
- Decide the frequency of posting.

 It’s important to make sure that you don’t approach Twitter relying on just guesswork. Having an action-plan helps you keep on track and provides you a better ROI for your online marketing efforts.

Focus on Engagement

Without having a clear understanding of how social media works, you will only waste your time using Twitter for business. Pay careful attention to the value of the word ‘social’ and forget about the ‘media’ part. Use Twitter as an online platform to connect and respond to your customers queries. While participating at a conversation, always try to be genuine and authentic.

Don’t Forget Search Engine Optimization

Keywords have got to play a major role when you use Twitter to fulfill your business objectives and goals. This is where most of the small business owners and companies fail to make a cut. Make sure you optimize your Twitter account with the keywords that are profitable in your industry. Follow these SEO tips to optimize your Twitter profile:

 - Choose a smart Twitter handle (username) that represents your business
- Include a link to your site in the website URL space.
- Include appropriate industry-related keywords in your bio.
- Submit your Twitter profile link to sites, blogs, and directories like twellow.

Optimizing your Twitter business profile for search engines doesn’t only help you get your content noticed quickly, but it also attracts more followers.

Use the Right Tools to Measure the ROI

Social media is not a numbers game. Having 20,000 or 40,000 followers on Twitter is not an accurate measure of your efforts. You need to use the right kind of tools to measure your Twitter influence. Therefore there is no tool that may give you the right ROI for your account.

Here are 4 great tools you can use to measure your ROI:

-HootSuite.
-TweetDeck.
- Klout.
-PeerIndex.

 You can also use Google Analytics to track the traffic from Twitter to your business website or blog. With this tool, you can also create ‘Advanced Segments’ so that you can compare your Twitter traffic with other social media sources like Facebook and Google+.

Hope this post covers the most important points for you to start using Twitter for your business, more posts will be published about using twitter soon.

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Tagged as: engagement, twitter, Twitter for business, twitter marketing

Article by Faissal Alhaithami

Entrepreneur, Social Media Specialist @Kataraqatar, gladly the founder of Fansbridge. Trainer and Keynote Speaker and the Author of Facebook marketing for smart people.

Faissal has written 53 awesome articles for us at Fans bridge blog

Twitter: @alhaithami | Facebook | Google+