Twitter, best practices and optimisation

A Twitter post (Tweet) can be received in as fast as one second. When news and information are shared on Twitter, it happens in real-time and thus creates real-time conversations unlike any other social platform available – among over 380 million users worldwide (as of 2011). Twitter is no longer in its recreational “guess what I had for lunch” infancy and organisations around the globe have learned from and adapted to the ways this powerful tool can be used to promote, engage, and learn online. Similar to Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr, Twitter also provides a free community outlet for promoting ongoing conversation with customers. You can subscribe, share, friend, or follow as many Twitter feeds as you like. It is also a place to share content, ideas, links, tips, and resources that can build your organisation to thought-leading status for your followers while allowing for connections to other industry-related sources.

The sources you choose to follow can have a direct impact on your ability to vastly improve your intake of relevant new information as an organisation (discussed further in the Rivers of Information section of this document). You will also be able to combine the new information with your own produced content, giving incentive for others to follow you and promote (Retweet) your posts. This not only creates links back to your channel, it also generates new followers based on keyword and subject searches.

Finally and most importantly, Twitter is an extremely powerful tool for monitoring and delivering timely responses to what is being communicated about your brand, your organisation, your products and your people. This is made possible by external applications that can integrate multiple social networking accounts/streams into one dashboard. This allows for a relatively easy way to monitor ongoing conversations of all the people you follow, giving you the ability to enter the conversation and respond accordingly. This adds a CRM layer that never existed before. These tools also allow for keyword alerts, letting you track where and when your name is mentioned to gauge sentiment.

As you will see, Twitter is much more than a way to send out 140-character messages about what’s on your mind. There is already customer conversation and news being exchanged about you and your industry and Twitter is just another way to tap in and capitalize on it.

Steps to use Twitter for your business

1. Decide your goals
2.  Set up your Twitter account and profile
3. Decide best practice and optimise your use of Twitter

WSI can help you

If you are unsure how to go about setting up and using Twitter (& Facebook) effectively, WSI run a deep-dive 1/2 day workshop, which will give you fully implementable advice, tips, and guidance. In this workshop you'll focus on:

• Improving Social Discovery, Search Discovery & Reputation Management
• Best practices on use
• Important considerations
• Tools and resources available
• How you can get started or improve your presence

Read more about the Twitter and Facebook Deep-Dive Workshop or ask your local WSI Digital Marketing Consultant for help

Find out more by joining a webinar, or see our 12 Steps, or ask your local WSI office about the 12 Steps Programme  which allows you to hit the ground running.