Reference: http://marketingland.com/library/twitter
Twitter has become a very powerful tool in communicating with like-minded individuals in a nearly effortless way. Many people use Twitter to communicate with their favorite bands, people, and businesses. This stresses the importance to take advantage of this opportunity to talk with your customers because if you aren’t talking with them, the other businesses are leaving you in the dark, so to speak. The Groundswell has created a method to integrate it into your business that I have touched on in my previous post.
Listening withTwitter
When it comes to interacting with your customers, you must first listen to what they have to say. This is easily done by developing a following and looking at what they post about your company or brand. Twitter provides information 24/7 allowing anyone to post or comment on the subject at anytime, which can be good and bad depending on how the situation is handled.
Twitter provides companies the opportunity to communicate in more personal way than other online sources. Through having meaningful and helpful conversations with your customer base and followers, the quality of service provided from the company will increase; however, on the negative aspect of this useful tool, if this following is ignored and a left unanswered, the problem could get out of hand very quickly with how easy it is to re-tweet something that interested someone.
Talking with Twitter
When it comes to properly talking and engaging with your following, it is important to identify the trends that are happening to be able to reach the largest audience. Hashtags (#) are used to tag a post for others to see. By adding trending tags to your post, the amount of people who will scroll across your post will increase. Engaging the audience on Twitter is much more difficult than other platforms because Twitter only allows for a maximum of 140 characters.
Earlier in the semester, I read an article by Andreas Caplan and Michael Haenlein called Users of the World Unite which provided 5 steps to be more social:
1. Be Active
2. Be Interesting
3. Be Humble
4. Be Unprofessional
5. Be Honest
These steps are important to remember because if you aren’t active, people will forget you among the mass amount of changing information that is constantly happening. You must be interesting to stand out from the noise and all the others who are trying to have their voice heard. By being humble and honest, your followers will be more enticed to engage with you and tell their friends about the company.
Energizing with Twitter
In order to energize your customer base, you must listen to what they are saying first. You are easily able to find the people who are interested through trending tags. After identification of the customer base, you can respond to followers and re-tweet positive things they have said and address the negative things in a timely manner. For example, the people of Calgary tweeted about bringing a new item to the Taco Bell menu that wasn’t available in Canada yet. The mayor of Calgary seen this and by working his magic, he got Taco Bell to bring the requested item to their western Canada locations.
Supporting with Twitter
As Twitter becomes increasingly popular, the usefulness of it also increases. However, if a company leaves their Twitter unattended and doesn’t take the feedback from its followers, the reputation could be impacted negatively as the conversations continue whether or not you decide to participate. I have seen first hand the benefits of being active from the NAIT account response time, which if during business hours often responds within minutes. NAIT actively participates in all the conversations regarding trending tags around the school. This improves the reputation of the company and should be utilized to its advantage.
Embracing with Twitter
Embracing your customer is about getting your point across and activly engaging them. Doing this through Twitter can be the hardest part of the process because of the limitation of 140 characters as mentioned previously. With the many different opinions from a following, communicating with such little space can be difficult but if done properly, can create feedback that would have been much more costly to obtain. By tweeting a new product or service, it is possible to get your following to embrace the change in a fast way.
Refer back to the POST Method blog that was posted to get a better understanding of how to integrate your company with The Groundswell.
Reference: http://www.textivia.com/business-twitter/
References
Kaplan, A., & Haenlein, M. (n.d.). Users of the world, unite! the challenges and opportunities of social media.. Retrieved from http://www.slideshare.net/escpexchange/kaplan-haenlein-users-of-the-world-unite-the-challenges-and-opportunities-of-social-media
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