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Marketing your small business. Try Twitter, here’s why

Twitter has over 320 million active users worldwide and sees over 500 million tweets posted each day. You don’t need to be a marketing expert to realise that’s a very deep pool of potential customers to engage with.

If you’re managing a Twitter account for your small business, then you hold the keys to the ideal tool for marketing your company to a new audience.  You can grow your Twitter following organically by posting relevant and useful content and engaging with your audience, as well as joining existing online conversations in your sector.

But Twitter isn’t just a great way to reach new customers, it’s also a very valuable tool for managing your online reputation and building brand awareness.

Managing your online reputation through Twitter

Twitter allows you to monitor what people are saying about your brand, and also identify trends in your industry. Twitter is often described as a listening tool and the platform makes it easy as pie to be a fly on the wall when people are talking about your company. In fact Twitter even lets you go a step further in being able to actively participate in these conversations.

As far as possible you want to encourage positive conversation around your brand. Twitter gives small businesses a chance to show off their personality a little, actively engage with followers, gain customers and encourage customer loyalty.  You can also bolster your online reputation by encouraging clients to share positive reviews about your service or products.

Using Twitter to Promote Brand Awareness

Twitter and Google are in bed together. By that I mean that they have a partnership whereby tweets are indexed by Google in real time. What does this mean for your brand? Well if you’re an active part of topics which your audience might be searching for, your tweets will crop up in many a search result.

This also means that what people are saying on Twitter can have a real impact on your brand, which is why you want people to be saying only good things! Push content that is useful and relatable to your market, and remember to engage. This could be the tipping point to attracting loyal brand advocates, not just customers.

Twitter as a Crowdsourcing Platform

 

Crowdsourcing, is the process of obtaining services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people (a “crowd”), especially from an online community. (Wikipedia)

Twitter gives you the opportunity to ask your followers questions and receive responses in real time, getting a massive jump on traditional market research methods.

This is another example of Twitter as a listening tool. By posing questions to your audience you’re gaining valuable first-hand insight into what drives them, what their desires are.

By asking your customers questions that involve them in your business, for example “What new dish should we put on our menu?” or “What colour should our new feature car be?”,  your company could be seen as truly caring about what the customer wants, and people respond to that.

To make things even easier, Twitter recently introduced a poll feature where you can create a question with two options for answering. The poll is open for 24 hours and once it is over, a push notification is sent out to all of the participants to see the final result.

Crowdsourcing is also reshaping recruitment and you can jump on this bandwagon to find the right candidates to join your team.

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