Social Media Marketing. Is Twitter Right For My Business?

I’m a huge advocate of using social media marketing to promote my business.

It’s paved the way for countless opportunities, opened doors to collaborations and found me some amazing clients to work with too.

One thing I’m often asked by my clients and at networking events is Twitter, specifically “is Twitter worth using for business?”. My answer is usually yes, but with a dose of “so long as that’s where your target audience is hanging out”.

Twitter is a fantastic marketing channel, but it takes some time and effort for the results to pay off. Here are my thoughts on using Twitter for your business and some considerations to ponder over when deciding if it’s worth it for you.

Decide what your marketing aim is for using Twitter

So many times I’ve heard “Twitter did nothing for me” and when I ask “what were you hoping to achieve” I’m often faced with a blank look and a few mumbled words along the lines of “I was told Twitter would help my business”.

Yes, twitter can help your business.

It’s up to you to decide what you want it to help with!

If you’re approaching Twitter without a strategy in place and hoping that just following and tweeting will get you results, it won’t. You need to decide on an objective first, which could be:

• brand awareness
• community building
• customer support
• lead generation
• reputation building

Each of those objectives need a different strategy in place for them to work.

Boosting your credibility as an influential business owner will need a different type of tweet than trying to find new customers through lead generation, for example.

It’s sensible to decide on one objective to begin with and once you feel it’s been achieved try another. So, you might decide to focus on brand awareness to start with, then building a community for your sales funnel and lead magnets which you can then use for lead generation purposes.

Do your target audience research before using Twitter for your business

Like I said above, it’s important that your target audience are actually hanging out on Twitter if you will be using it for your marketing. So do your research.

Although there are 313 million active monthly users of Twitter, are all of them using it the way you need them to? If you’re a B2B business, not everyone (including business owners) will use Twitter to connect with other businesses, some will be using it purely for personal reasons.

If you are a direct to consumer business owner, test the waters a little by searching for keywords related to your business and seeing what’s already out there. Are people talking about products/services like yours? Are your competitors using Twitter successfully? Is your target demographic active on Twitter or do they hang out elsewhere online?

No matter how good your Twitter marketing strategy is, it will not work if your target audience aren’t using the platform.

Make sure you have content to share on Twitter

One problem I see with business owners trying to use Twitter is a lack of content from their own website. All too often they’re retweeting other people or sharing content from elsewhere.

The problem with this strategy is that you end up promoting that content and those businesses above your own, so although you become known as a good person to follow it doesn’t directly benefit your marketing objectives.

Before using Twitter it’s vital that you have your own content ready to share, this can be blog posts, videos, memes, quotes, testimonials, etc. Whatever it is, make sure it clearly belongs to you through branding, using your business logo and linking back to your website wherever possible.

So back to the original question: Is Twitter right for your business? Yes, I do think Twitter is right for most business owners to be using for their marketing. I’ve seen it work well for myself and many of my clients. However, remember that Twitter marketing requires a good strategy based on research and insights into your target audience, provided you do that and ensure you take a consistent approach to using Twitter it should work well for you too.