Well Twitter is working well for us, over the last few months we have gained new customers and generated penty of business. It has helped to increase the business profile and my personal profile.
So what I have learnt about twitter also works with LinkedIn and Facebook, it's all about chatting to build up trust and relationships, in other words it's networking.
Besides picking up new customers I have made some great contacts who are helping us as a business.
Many business' have embraced the likes of Twitter as part of the communication and marketing. A great example of this is how the MD of Starbucks uses Twitter to communicate with his customers and staff. A very bad example are one of their competitors Costa Coffee who joined Twitter in October 2008 and wrote "We've finally arrived on Twitter!" but have not communicated since. In my opinion this is very poor for Costa Coffee.
Many business' are missing out, an example of this are "East Midlands Trains". Over time I have read so many bad reports about their service on Twitter but they appear to not use Twitter. On Twitter "East Midlands Trains" could be seen to manage customer feed back and take the right actions to rectify issues. They could use it to post information about offers, train delays and news.For example "East Midlands Trains" had a great green news story the other week about how the trains switch the engines off when in the station.(Read more here) That would have made some good Twitter PR.
In the SME sector Twitter can help pubs to promote themselves, an example of that is the Cross Keys near Belper who have recently had a refit, they now use twitter as part of their marketing.
Did you know that that Twitter now gets more than 1 Billion tweets per month.
So what I have learnt about twitter also works with LinkedIn and Facebook, it's all about chatting to build up trust and relationships, in other words it's networking.
Besides picking up new customers I have made some great contacts who are helping us as a business.
Many business' have embraced the likes of Twitter as part of the communication and marketing. A great example of this is how the MD of Starbucks uses Twitter to communicate with his customers and staff. A very bad example are one of their competitors Costa Coffee who joined Twitter in October 2008 and wrote "We've finally arrived on Twitter!" but have not communicated since. In my opinion this is very poor for Costa Coffee.
Many business' are missing out, an example of this are "East Midlands Trains". Over time I have read so many bad reports about their service on Twitter but they appear to not use Twitter. On Twitter "East Midlands Trains" could be seen to manage customer feed back and take the right actions to rectify issues. They could use it to post information about offers, train delays and news.For example "East Midlands Trains" had a great green news story the other week about how the trains switch the engines off when in the station.(Read more here) That would have made some good Twitter PR.
In the SME sector Twitter can help pubs to promote themselves, an example of that is the Cross Keys near Belper who have recently had a refit, they now use twitter as part of their marketing.
Did you know that that Twitter now gets more than 1 Billion tweets per month.
So here are a few tips that may help you.
In you profile and twitter back ground tell people what you do, may be your interests etc.
Provide value, share interesting information, help others, if you read something interesting on the web, share the link and information.
Participate in conversations. Make it fun.
Be you and be original. Don’t be afraid to say what's on your mind. Express your view point. Remember people buy from people.
If all you do is talk about what you do and about yourself or if you only promote your product all the time, people will get bored of you. Good idea is to mix what you post i.e 1/3 about you and 2/3 helping others, retwittering interesting stuff etc.
Tweet regularly, try to do it every day. If people see your profile was last updated say 1 week ago, they will probably not follow you.
Search for people who share common interests etc.
Always remember that what you post is posted to the world so be careful what you say.
If I can help you with Twitter please get in contact.
Thanks for reading.
Great post and wraps up a lot of points about twitter in one go. I agree that many companies are not taking Online Reputation Management seriously and should be searching (Google Alerts) and responding to negative comments and ultimately trying to help calm the situation or offer advice.
ReplyDeleteThere are a few companies that are doing this extremely well, and I have found myself wanting to engage with them and feel happier about buying from them.
Cheers
Richard
Good advice. I am still surprised at the number of business that are not getting to grips with the whole social media aspect of business.
ReplyDeleteBT used to "say its good to talk" but it seems the dont think it's good to tweet.
Over the weekend we saw a complaint made about the service of Vodafone provides. The complaint was on twitter and immediately responded to by their online team promising to look into it.
A similar complaint directed at BT on twitter is still waiting a response.#fail
"It's good to tweet"