Tweet! Tweet!
| January 28, 2010 | Written by: ebolling |
Hello All!
As a new member to Anchorage Downtown Partnership, I will be writing a weekly blog about cheap, free and easy marketing ideas for businesses. This week I’m going to talk about social media and how to properly use Twitter to help your business.
It seems like everywhere you turn people are talking about Twitter and Tweeting! Sometimes I get the feeling it’s been ingrained into people’s head that their business NEEDS to use Twitter that people forget how to effectively use it for a business.
When Twitter was created, it was a take off of something that Facebook used as one of their features called “Status Update”. Basically, it is a sentence or two (140 characters) about whatever you are doing, what you are thinking or something you find interesting. It’s a quick way to keep an update on your friends and celebrities. Through the evolution of Twitter, businesses realized that they could make an account and give information about their business and so on. The problem now is businesses have a hard time trying to track the effectiveness of Twitter. I’m going to show you an example of how a business could measure the effectiveness of their Twitter account.
Lets take a food business like Dave’s Donuts. Dave decides to make a Twitter account and he Tweets each day about the store or maybe about the daily donut special. But if Dave has no followers or if his followers are people in Texas, his social media is not being used effectively. Dave needs a way to find his target audience and once he does that he needs to find a reason for people to follow his Tweets.
Now lets say that Dave decides to somehow collect his customer’s information like their Twitter account name. Maybe he does a weekly drawing for a dozen donuts and for people to win, they have to put their Twitter account name as their contact info. Then, each week the winners are announced on Twitter when Dave Tweets their name.
Dave is now effectively communicating to HIS audience and he is using Twitter as a marketing tool to get people to check his Tweets. He also has his customers Twitter user name so he can follow them and most likely, they will add Dave and follow him. Dave is now using social media effectively and hopefully this tool will transition into new business opportunities for him like new followers, more customers checking Tweets from Dave’s Donuts and possibly more traffic into his store which equals more $$$$$$!
The key to Twitter and all social media is:
1. Finding your target audience
2. Keeping their attention – make them want to check your Tweets!
3. Being able to measure the effectiveness of your Tweets
P.S. Did I mention that Twitter is FREE????
Here’s a link to more FAQ’s about Twitter http://help.twitter.com/forums/10711/entries/13920
For more questions or comments email me at: ebolling@anchoragedowntown.org
