At Jackie Awve Marketing, we give compliments where compliments are due! Today, we have to pay a compliment our clients. Most of them are excellent business development professionals that are expert atnetworking the breakfast meeting or cocktail hour. Many of them work in commercial real estate, property management companies, and for building contractors. While they excel at using their charisma and exude professionalism in person, many haven’t quite figured out how to convert those social skills to an online environment.
Every social media platform has its own vibe and set of norms. Of course, Jackie Awve Marketing works closely with clients to determine the best online community(s) for their businesses. Even before taking this deep dive into your business strategy with us, we thought it would be helpful to provide a primer about one of our most asked about Social Media platforms: Twitter.
Twitter has a reputation among a certain generation that people tweet stream of thought. It could not be further from the truth. “Oh, I am eating lunch now.” is not the typical tweet.
As a social channel, Twitter allows you to do important research, spot trends, and build a global community. Another important benefit is that it can help you gain rank in search engine results. All of this is to help you build authority in your industry and become the go-to person for your product or service.
To help get everyone more comfortable with Twitter, we put together a baker’s dozen of useful tips and tricks.
- You only have 140 characters to grab someone’s attention.
- Follow people of interest to you. If you don’t find Twitter interesting, it is because of the company you are keeping. Follow people that share content of interest to you. Don’t like what you see: just unfollow or mute.
- Ask a question, be cheerful, and please don’t SHOUT with all caps!
- Don’t betray your Twitter followers! Make sure what you say in the headline is relevant to what you’re posting.
- Test it – pay attention to changes in your headlines and how they perform with your audience.
- Every audience is unique, but afternoon and weekend tweets tend to get more click-thrus.
- Attending a relevant industry event? Tweet about it; it’s timely and interesting.
- Use images and numbers. We have dubbed this technique “text interuptus.” Images create a visual break that draws the eye. Using stats not only falls into the text interuptus category but including them shows that you might be providing more than fluff.
- Avoid cluster tweeting. This is a big pet peeve in the Twitterverse. There is nothing like 12 tweets in a row from the same person that is random and irrelevant. Then silence. You wouldn’t go to an event and blurt out a dozen random things without response and then run away. Awkward, right? Treat social media like you would live networking in this regard.
- Consistency and frequency is critical to Twitter success.
- Hashtag it, baby! Hashtags allow you to engage with people interested in the topic that you are tweeting about. Keep it relevant and focus on your keywords.
- BUT don’t over-hashtag! If it is not relevant, it looks amateurish and is a waste of your valuable real estate (the 140 character count!).
- Focus on your targeted buyer. This will help you stay on point and build a Twitter community that is meaningful.
I couldn’t resist adding one more to the list of twitter tips. It is just one word but is an important one: Engage. Remember the networking event example? Don’t be that guy or gal that only talks about him or herself. If you see something you like, be sure to give a friendly RT (retweet), favorite, or reply.
Want to learn more about how to make Twitter work for you? To make it easy, use our free workbook Social Prospecting & Twitter. The workbook includes:
- Short preparatory work to make the actual prospecting easy
- Visual instructions on how and where to find prospects
- Pro tips that will help you get the best results
- Prescriptions (Marketing Rx) for success
- Exercises for follow-up prospecting