Using Twitter for business branding

There have been many debates regarding the latest social media trends and their exploitation. The smart ones have started using them excessively and the others still consider them too tacky and easily subjected to spam.

Date: 03 March 2010 Author: Ivana Bozinovska

1. The Profile

The Twitter profile is the first and most important step in building the whole brand on Twitter. By the look and feel of the profile the audience can sense the seriousness of your intentions to correspond with them and answer questions and requests in a truthful manner.

The must-haves are:

• Customized brand name or some expression that associates to the brand name
• Customized Twitter Design according to the brand (preferably with contact information, logo, brand colors)
• Clearly filled in profile information, website links included
• Add the people that are somehow connected to your brand – partners, employees (for employees it is essential to somehow stress their twitter profiles by adding them to a separate twitter list that is made public)

 

2. The Network

Building the network is essential since the audience that follows you, are your potential customers and opinion makers. For local brands I recommend local Twitter websites – like nearbytweets.com

Start following people, you can find them as your prospects and people you already know and start following their friends and friends of friends. Since Twitter is a word-of-mouth community, the word about the existence of your brand will soon be spread. However you can enhance it by adding the profile to some Twitter directories and thus getting found by certain topic or brand name.

Also for your field of interest is the Twitter Search option that you can use to see your brand appearance in recent tweets and at the same time to find your audience by certain keywords relevant to your field of interest. By searching the keyword of your interest you can start following people that genuinely are interested in the industry or the product you are selling or at the bottom line, your brand.

Lately, Google has added a similar option in their search results called Real Time Search, where by simply searching a certain term; you get real time results at the begging of the first page from Twitter, regarding the searched query. This is also a plus since now by regularly updating your Twitter posts with your important keywords; you will be often on the first page.

Also it is useful to add live Twitter feed of tweets about your brand and your own Twitter profile postings. In that way can gain followers from your website/ blog readers and advertise your Twitter profiles just the same as you advertise your website – online and offline.

 

3. The Engagement

The engagement is something that will boost your brand and make further new followers. It is important to remember that the Twitter correspondence with the followers is in a form of a discussion not a broadcasting of how your brand is good and the followers should use it.

It is important to answer questions from followers, to post interesting and engaging topics and to discuss with random people that just mention your keyword – found on Twitter Search. User the reply and retweet option from Twitter or if you have multiple brands you some of Twitter's or any other social media platform like TweetDeck, Seesmick, Echofon.

Also publish something helpful for the audience and use incentives to develop a discussion – discounts, coupons etc.

For certain events and measuring the tweets, use the hash tag # and the keyword. Engage the audience to use the # when discussing the event or a certain topic. In that way you will have a better insight of the event’s / topic’s success.

 

4. The Analysis

There are several tools for measuring the success of your Twitter profile. First you can see it by the number of followers, also see the daily retweets of your posts, daily replies etc.

Next is to see by the number of visits to your website that came from Twitter.

And last but not least, use an online tool for measuring the popularity of your Twitter profile. Something like Twitter Grader form Hubspot where the quality score of the Twitter profile is measured taking into account different measures such as: the number of followers, their number of followers, name mentions, replies to your account, retweets of your posts, number of updates you have etc.

Hope you will have a better exploitation of your Twitter account the next time you decide to post something. Use regular methods and means for increasing the popularity of your brand through Twitter; in that way you will have real measures.