Twitter. The Pandora’s box of social media marketing? or simply an inane babble that takes time out of your day to the detriment of your business.
Views on twitter are mixed from my experience, from the avid fan to the “hmm, I’m not sure it’ll work for me” type to the “total waste of time and effort” brigade.
Where am I in this mix. Probably erring on the side of avid fan and can absolutely see where Twitter fits into our social media marketing and engagement effort.
So what have we (@barneyausten, @eoinredmond and @myprojectracker) learnt as we developed our profiles?
Lesson 1:
When we started, it was all about the numbers. We signed up for all those silly auto-follower type applications and essentially swamped ourselves with meaningless drivel for the most part. Because we ended up following up such a huge number, we were losing the quality items from people we should really have been following in a variety of fields.
If we were starting out again, we would take our time and use the various twitter search capabilities to enable us to identify and follow people who we were interested in. Which reminds me, must do a cleanup!
Lesson 2:
Because we ended up following alot of the wrong people, our ability to actually converse with them along with the ability to sent quality “RT’s”on was seriously diminished.
So assuming you are now following people of interest you now need to
Respond, engage, shoot the breeze, banter…. Yes, you need to take the time out to talk to the people you are following and who are following you. You never know when it can pay dividends.
Again, there are some mixed views on whether you should tweet your life out there. For us, we are not afraid to put a bit of ourselves out there a bit (Eoin and his penchant for Liverpool FC and Golf!, me with my slightly obscure musical tastes and venting the odd frustration!). Why – because we think it makes us more real.
Lesson 3 :
The company twitter account. We started sending out all sorts from it. Now we hardly send anything, most people will not engage with a company (yes, there are exceptions I know) and it is not the appropriate address to be sending personal items from anyway.
The plan for the company twitter account now is for product notifications and support. We will encourage new sign-ups to follow us so they have one (of a few) locations to go if there are problems or they want to keep in touch.
Lesson 4:
Self promotion. Using the medium purely for self and company promotion. This is a big Yawn and people won’t follow. What did we learn? Mix and match. Some promotion is ok and will generate leads and contacts etc. We are just trying to get the balance right.
So what – you’re using Twitter – wahoo. What are you getting out of it?
Lots actually. Business contacts, beta testers (90% of them) and loads of really useful information from tweets about articles. Chances are you came to this post via Twitter. Oh and some great humour when things are feeling grim in the office!
Twitter works however you want it to. It just takes a bit of getting used to and I would not admit to being an expert - simply someone who wants to share his experience with the medium.
Does twitter work for you and your business? Share your story with us.
Hi Barney,
nice post and yep ! I came here from twitter
Hi Brian. Thanks for the comment and for reading. I hear what you are saying on the “say and pray” bit – think it depends very much on what you are trying to achieve. What works for us may not work for everyone
Cheers
Barney
[...] And yet another post on Twitter for business. And what one business learned about using it along the way. MyProjectTracker [...]
Hi Barney, Eoin,
Actually I came here from Bloggertone because Brian below mentioned this post in his related post
I really enjoyed reading it, thankfully I never used automated systems, so my followers are mostly genuine. I believe in personal tweets, I minimize them from my @seefincoaching acc, but go hell for leather on @elainerogers because I am a sociable person, and don't mind my clients seeing that, they are human too
Great post!
Hi Elaine. Thanks for the comment and glad you liked the post. You are right – it's best to use your “own name” account for the customer engagements.