The world has gone mad for social marketing and social networking. It now makes up a sizeable part of the marketing mix for most companies and advisors are suggesting that it should make up 10% of the marketing budget in time and spend. As a delivery tool the results can be very varied depending on the market sector and the effort put in.

Twitter for example is very popular at the moment. But how can I make it work for me? Firstly, you need to decide how to use twitter for the most effective results for your business. There is always the danger with social networking to let it take up too much time! As mentioned above; your social networking/marketing should make up 10% of your online marketing time. If you are on twitter all day – there is something wrong.

Listening out on the Twitter airwaves

The first way to use Twitter is to engage and open communication potential and existing customers. This has proved to be an effective strategy for many brands as they can be notified instantly if anyone mentions their brand or company name and react accordingly. Read this example:

A guy is sitting in an internet café using the free wifi service. The wifi malfunctions and he sends out a tweet on Twitter telling his friends that the wifi is down in the café and he is annoyed that he will have to move on to finish his work. The pr company (for the large chain of coffee shops) pick up the tweet as they have a search running for their client’s name. They contact the coffee shop immediately and ask them to locate the person packing away his laptop. The guy is given a free cup of coffee and the wifi connection is fixed. 5 minutes later he tweets a new message: singing the praises of the coffeeshop.

A negative pr situation is instantly turned on its head.

Note: This doesn’t mean scouring twitter manually day and night in the hope of intercepting a tweet about you. Use the search functions on www.tweetdeck.com for example to be alerted when you are mentioned. You can also use this search function to be alerted of any tweet or conversation that mentions a word or phrase you are interested in.

Tweeting for tweeting sake

Don’t tweet for the sake of it – if you subject your followers to masses of inane updates about the state of your health and what your dog ate for breakfast you will soon loose that following (unless you are a blonde celebrity!).

However, broadcasting your offers and new products to encourage clicks back through to your website should also be part of your strategy but it is worth remembering that you need to make your tweets and updates interesting to your audience so that they will follow your links – address the issues that affect them.

If you only bombard them with self promotional tweets they will not feel that you are adding value and will cease to click through to your site or worse; unfollow you. If they really like what you are saying they may ‘Retweet’ your message to their followers, and so your message is spread further afield.

Tweet etiquette:

• Do follow back any followers that you have a genuine interest in.
• Do Retweet useful info from your fellow tweeple.
• Understand and use the @replies sparingly or you will be inundating your audience with half conversations – very dull.
• Cut out the running commentary – 25 tweets an hour will push other people’s messages off followers’ homepages.
• Don’t over use #hashtags, in fact don’t use them at all unless you are genuinely contributing to the conversation.
• Do Check your links before you tweet them.
• Do complete your bio information as fully as possible
• Do use a picture of yourself or an image that represents your brand well.
• No swearing or verbally attacking fellow twitterers
• Watch your follower/follow ratio. If you are following thousands more than follow you – you are probably a spammer.

What are your experiences of twitter? Do you have anything to add? Please do leave a comment…

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 4th, 2009 at 4:26 pm and is filed under Online Strategies, Social Media, twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.