Using Twitter to Support Your Business Social Media Strategy

How to monitor and promote your company with tweets
by Meryl K. Evans, Editor, Professional Services Journal

With springtime come blooming flowers and the start of a new baseball season. After the first rendition of “Take Me out to the Ballgame,” picture yourself sitting in a large stadium looking down on the bright green diamond and undisturbed brown dirt.

The home team hits the field. There’s the pitcher ready to throw the ball and set the play in motion. At the other end waiting for the pitch is the catcher who prepares to stop whatever the batter doesn’t hit. The visiting team’s batter marches toward the batter’s box looking confident and determined to whack whatever the pitcher throws to take his team’s first offensive move toward its overall strategy to win the game.

For businesses with a social media strategy, Twitter is the pitcher, Facebook is the catcher, and LinkedIn is the batter. You may substitute the catcher with a different social network tactic. Twitter and the other social networks are not a strategy. They’re tools and tactics to support a company’s social media or marketing strategy.

Whatever you include in your social media lineup, you want to coach your Twitter player to succeed in using the tools to help the team win with its strategy, especially in the areas of self-promotion and monitoring.

Twitter is much more than monitoring and self-promotion. The reason for the focus on these two is that not every business feels it needs to be active in Twitter. Every business must at least listen in on Twitter. As for promotion, every business wants to promote its products and services, and that alone can affect the outcome of the game.

Monitor people’s experiences

People talk about your company and your competitors all the time. If they run into a problem with a product or service, they’ll tweet about it. If they have a bad experience with customer service, they’ll tweet that, too. Don’t fret — not all tweets are negative. People tweet about amazing experiences and why they love JKL company.

If someone struggles to find answers to a problem, he or she’ll ask for help in Twitter. Imagine what would happen if you solve that person’s problem without mentioning your product or service. You may find a new evangelist for your company. Tweets like “I’m looking into ABC and XYZ. Which do you like better? Why?” appear all the time. You don’t want to miss them when someone mentions you or your competitor.

Also keep in mind that your company can recover from negative tweets. In one case, a customer tweeted her disappointment in a company’s lack of response to her email requesting help after she had already looked for answers on her own. Within a few minutes, the company responded with a link so she could submit a trouble ticket. It took only 15 minutes from her first tweet to get the problem solved. After that, she wrote two positive tweets about the company. Two positive tweets to one negative; that’s a good deal.

As soon as you find a complaint or negative tweet mentioning your company, acknowledge the tweet even if you don’t have a solution right away. Then, use follow-up tweets as needed to resolve the problem. Every situation is different. You want to be listening and ready to respond.

Limit self-promotion

Every major league baseball stadium has posted ads. But they don’t dominate the baseball experience. If they do, it’ll turn off fans who want to watch the game without too many distractions. Businesses on Twitter, of course, want to promote their products, services and content. You can do that as long as it doesn’t take over the Twitter game.

Several experienced social media users share their help and self-promotion ratio, but no one rule stands out. One expert says he tweets one self-promotion for every 10 tweets. Another uses the 80/20 principle with 20 percent of the tweets being self-promos and 80 percent devoted to helping others, sharing expertise (without selling) and posting useful resources.

People always break rules in social media. You will find Twitter accounts that do nothing but tweet the latest articles and blog entries from their own websites. Often, the people behind the website or company have separate Twitter accounts for engaging and helping others.

You can make your self-promotion tweets more helpful. For example, if you want to share your company’s latest blog post, don’t just tweet the post title and link. Give people a reason to check it out by telling them what’s in it for them. (Yes, the old standby of “what’s in it for me” (WIIFM) applies to Twitter!)

Be human like Babe Ruth

Twitter gives companies the chance to show the people behind social media who like to help and want to share valuable information with others. It’s harder to say no to a person who answers your question than to a company that talks to no one and only talks about itself.

Use Twitter to listen, engage and help while limiting the self-promotion. Go the distance, ease their pains, and people will come to you and your company.

About the editor

Meryl K. Evans is senior editor at InternetVIZ and the content maven behind the IT Solutions Journal, Connected Digest and Professional Services Journal. Follow her on Twitter @merylkevans.