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How To Use Twitter To Build Your Business – Part 2 March 5, 2015
Here is the second part of How To Use Twitter To Build Your Business. If you missed the first part, you can find it here. The second part will cover: - Using Twitter For Business - How To Use Twitter Groups - Building Your Twitter Network - Twitter Marketing Plan As a disclaimer: I’m not the biggest expert on Twitter, so what I will share in this posts is what I learned and what works for me so far. Enjoy
How To Use Twitter To Build Your Business PART FOUR: Using TWITTER For Business
The power of Twitter is that it’s so easy to network with it. When you follow someone on Twitter, their followers will see you too. And since network marketing is a numbers game, the more people see and hear you, the better.
Marketing
As we talked about with inbound marketing, you want to pull people into your business, rather than having to chase after them. It’s like an avid bird watcher leaving bread crumbs out for birds so they come to where he wants them. If you can get your audience curious, they’ll come to you wanting more. Here are just some of the things you can try.
a. Promote your website. Link up your company website, your blog articles, or any sites that talk about your products, services and business. If your content is interesting to them, they may tweet about it on their own. b. Announce special sales, new products and promos. Since your posts are public, someone may get interested in what you’re marketing. If you like, you can even give special discounts only to your followers. Here, the hashtag will be your best friend. c. Give tips, special advice, helpful material and how-tos related to your industry. The idea is to offer something of value to other people. The best scenario is that people consider you an expert in this field and will come to you for advice. This is a good lead-in for talking about your business later. d. Give updates on your events. An excellent way to market an event and get curious people to come. Even those who aren’t attending may want to hear about it as well, so you can start a chat sessions with them so you can find out more. e. Collect testimonials. Go on Twitter Search and look for what people are saying about your products and your company. If you find a good testimonial, mark it as a favorite. These all go on your Favorites list. If people ask you about your business, link them to this page. Nothing beats praise from someone who’s actually happy with your product!
No matter what your aim is, it’s important to avoid spamming. Twitter doesn’t take well to spammers. Don’t constantly send out messages about your products and businesses without saying anything valuable or useful to anyone. Not only can that practice get your account banned, it will give your brand and business a bad name.
Get your Twitter Marketing under control in 2015 with this daily step-by-step checklist
Lead Generation
As mentioned before, the more people you come in contact with in Twitter, the better for you. Using Twitter to get leads needs a lot of work, but if you are good at it, they may end up finding you instead!
1. Update your blog regularly. Make one if you don’t have one, as it’s quite easy and is yourbest source of traffic. Think of your 140-character Twitter post as a teaser or a lead-in to the “real” content found on the blog. Needless to say, read the comments you get. Your regular visitors may just be the leads you’re looking for. 2. Create a specialized landing page for Twitter followers. This is where people from Twitter will link to. Consider it the digital version of the elevator pitch. It should summarize the most important things your product and business, enough so that people will become interested and want to know more. 3. Chat with your followers. Send them a direct message to say hello and strike up a conversation. Look for things you have in common. Be interested in their lives and they’ll take an interest in yours. From there, you can lead into what you do in your business. 4. Retweet your followers’ posts. This tit-for-tat is a great way to build a connection with them and they’ll most likely return the favor, which in turn will give you better exposure on their networks.
5. Search for people in your niche. Are you in the health and wellness industry? The coffee industry? Technology? Home economics? Look for people with the same interests and follow them. You already have something in common that you can talk about, after all! 6. Keep giving valuable content. Keep people interested in you. Tweet your observations, your motivational quotes, useful information, anything that will help other people. Do you read self-help books? Why not talk about it? Keep the attitude that the more you give, the more you get. 7. Search for people who need your products. Once again, Twitter Search will come in mighty handy here. Search popular keywords, problems and questions related to your business. Chat with people who have these questions and try to help them. You just might get the solid lead you’re looking for.
8. Ask for referrals. A simple yet largely overlooked tip for lead generation. If you’re on good terms with your followers, they’ll be more than happy to help you. Simply ask if they know someone who needs what you have or are looking to get into some kind of business.
Lifestyle Branding
When you use a certain brand or product, it makes the statement on who you are and what your level of taste is. That’s what lifestyle branding is all about: who I am and what I like. At the same time, it’s you living your life in a way that puts your business in the best possible light.
So how do you do that?
1. Professionalize your Twitter profile. That means having your own personal design, complete with logo. You must also do the same for your blog or website. It’s recommended that you hire someone to make a professional artwork or banner for you if you don’t have that skill. Your viewers will see these first before they meet you, so you want to give them as favorable an impression as possible. 2. Actually use your product. That’s right. Love it, live it, enjoy it. You are your best testimonial. If people see you enjoying the benefits of your product, they’ll want to know more about it to see if it can help them. Conversely, if you don’t enjoy it, how can you convince anyone else about it? 3. Talk about how your business helps you enjoy your life. People are attracted to the positive. If they see someone enjoying something, they’d be curious about how they got there. Talk about the places you’ve been to, the people you’ve met, the interesting things you’ve done. Has your business made you richer? If yes, why hide it? Tell the world how you got there! Again, your blog will come in handy here in talking about the details, with your tweets functioning as the bait for the longer entry. 4. Be a leader in your industry. You should genuinely know not just about your own product but about the industry as a well. Write about it in your blog and share what you know.
5. Create your own style.
Products can be commonplace, but what you do with them is your own and talks about how unique you are. So set yourself apart from the crowd by using your product in a way that is uniquely your own. Are you an athlete in a health MLM company? Talk about how vitamin supplements help you out in those long marathon runs. Are the handbags you market fashionable during a certain season? Show people how it can work. As long you make it interesting and fun, you’ll be sure to attract attention. And since a picture can paint a thousand words, take pictures of your lifestyle and upload them on Twitpic. More on Twitpic later.
The hidden message in lifestyle branding is this could be you. Without really trying, you can entice people to join your business using the idea that they can get exactly what you have—the image, the identity, the brand. But to get there, you first have to show them what you have and how much you love it.
Get your Twitter Marketing under control in 2015 with this daily step-by-step checklist
Connecting directly with your market The power of Twitter is its immediacy. You can tweet and chat about events as they happen in real time. In fact, many Tweeters have gotten used to this immediacy such that they may even get annoyed if you don’t reply to their messages quickly enough!
Sometimes, you may want to call specific people’s attention in your tweets. You can use the@ sign to do this. By putting the @ in front of person’s username, this notifies the person that you’re talking about them and gives them the chance to respond to you. You can also insert the @username anywhere in the sentence!
Note, however, that if you put the @username at the start of the sentence, it can only be seen by your followers and the people you’re mentioning. Example:
If you want the conversation to be public (and you normally would), tweet:
How are you doing, @TedRubin? If, on the other hand, you WANT to send a private message, use the D sign to do it. To do this, start your tweet with D username. Example:
This will send a private message to your correspondent, much like an email. Another way to do this is to simply click the Messages link on the toolbar and select New Message. You can put the username of your contact in the address bar.
So now you know how to talk directly to Tweeps, how do you engage them?
1. Search for your brand or even your name on Twitter. You want to know what people are saying about you, your business and your products. If they’re saying good things, then you have a new crop of testimonials to favorite. If they’re saying bad things, well, at least you can find out what areas you can improve on. You can ask for constructive criticism from the more articulate customers. 2. Get to know your market’s questions, problems, needs and challenges. This means you must be genuinely interested in what they have to say. In network marketing, fortune favors the curious! 3. Provide answers and solutions if you can or point them to people who can help. This earns you goodwill and establishes your credibility as a leader in your industry.
Finally, nothing is stopping you from asking your followers to retweet your posts. It’s another way to leverage your contacts!
How To Use Twitter To Build Your Business PART FIVE: Using Third-Party Applications
Simply put, a third-party application is a product or service not created by Twitter but can be used to access tweets and other Twitter data, thus enhancing the entire Twitter experience. It can be either a browser plug-in or a web application or a program you download directly into your computer.
Third-party applications give enormous benefits, particularly if you are using Twitter for business and marketing. From managing teams of people to automating and scheduling tweets to streamlining marketing strategies, there are quite a number of applications that do these jobs well.
Here are a few:
Twhirl A piece of desktop software installed on your computer, Twhirl allows you to connect to and manage multiple Twitter accounts, post/tweet enriched content such as photos and videos easily, and quickly answer and read tweets or send messages to contacts. There’s also an embedded search function and URL shortener so you save on characters in your messages. As opposed to constantly logging in and out of various account, work on all of them with Twhirl.
TweetDeck Now part of Twitter, TweetDeck also allows for managing multiple Twitter accounts; in fact, it allows one to add other social media accounts like Facebook, LinkedIn, and others. In a single In a single glance you can see new tweets, any mentions of your username, direct messages, and others. You can even add columns for specific people whose tweets you want to watch for. It also has its own URL shortener and allows for image and video posting.
Are there specific tweets you don’t want to see?
TweetDeck has handy filters that let the user avoid tweets with marked keywords. TweetDeck also has a mobile phone version, so one can use the application on various phone operating systems to check tweets, direct messages, etc.
Hootsuite Need something to help you manage an entire marketing campaign? Want to make Twitter accounts easier to handle for a team? How about scheduling tweets to appear on your audience’s feeds? All of that’s possible through Hootsuite.
A web-based application used by heavyweights such as the New York Public Library, Fox, and the White House, Hootsuite not only allows you to view and manage several Twitter and other social media accounts, but you can post messages across all of them! You can also track community-building and campaigns through various accounts. This streamlines your to-do list for social media marketing and makes it more efficient. Scheduling tweets and messages to be posted is also handy: Instead of logging in four times a week to post a link to a video or photo, log in once and schedule four tweets to launch at specific times during the week. A paid upgrade allows one other function such as analytics, but there’s a lot that can be done with just the free version. There’s also a mobile version you can use with various phone operating systems.
Social Oomph If you’re short on time but want to expand your online presence through Twitter, Social Oomph has the tools you need. Like Hootsuite, you can schedule tweets on Social Oomph; you can save drafts of tweets and then reuse them when needed. Track specific keywords on Twitter streams to monitor a brand, mentions, topics, etc. You can even set up alerts and Social Oomph will send you the tweets through email. You can also automatically send pre-made direct messages to those who follow you, and unfollow those who unfollow you. Their proprietary URL shortener monitors how many actually click on the URL. Social Oomph also has an extended profile, which allows for more information and formatting than the typical Twitter profile; you can add images, links, etc for a profile with more, well, oomph.
Get your Twitter Marketing under control in 2015 with this daily step-by-step checklist
How To Use Twitter To Build Your Business
PART SIX: How To Use TWITTER GROUPS
Why Use Groups? Once you have hundreds of followers, it will be hard to track who’s who and what they’re talking about. Twitter makes it easy for you by allowing you to have groups or “lists.” You can customize this list with whatever label you want—friends, family, co-workers, people you play sports with, people who owe you money, etc. Of course, you can also organize them into prospects, marketing leaders, clients, and associates. When you click on a list you get a live stream of all the tweets of that list’s members. If they want to, they can also choose to follow the list itself.
How Groups can help Lists act as your filters. Because you can add members to whatever group you want, lists can help you keep your Twitter feeds organized according to topics or people. If you’re looking for certain kinds of information, you can just look at a group’s feed rather than have to pick through a long continuous stream of tweets. For example, you can make your company list and add all your co-workers there. Then you can simply visit the list and check what they’re saying. You can do the same for customers, downlines, and prospects. You can also use lists to group together a top tweeters list that you think others should follow. Then they have the option to follow anyone on the list or simply follow the list itself. This builds up your reputation as the go-to person for good info. Finally, you have the option to simply follow a list rather than any of the members themselves. While you go through the feed, you can then pick and choose which members you want to follow. This is very useful if you don’t want to follow just anyone on a list, as some tweet may too much for your taste.
How to Create Lists Twitter lists are simple to create. Just click on your avatar image on the right side of the search bar (it shows “Profile and Settings” when hovering over) and it will bring up the list pop-up window where you will find “Lists”. Click on it…
Here you will find “Create new list” tab under “Create a list” section. Here you can enter the name of your list and mark it as either public or private. Of course, give your list a relevant name. When a list is public, it can be viewed by everyone. Anyone can also follow the list. For our purposes, it is best if you can make the list public. When a list is private, only you can view this list. That means that even people that are on this list cannot view or subscribe to it.
It’s really simple to add people to a list.
You will see a gear icon left to the “Follow” button. Click on it. Here you will see “Add or remove from lists…” Simply choose the list you want to add to. You can choose to add to the several lists if you want to. You can create a new list to add as well.
How To Use Twitter To Build Your Business PART SEVEN: Building Your TWITTER NETWORK
In past chapters, we’ve outlined the various tools and applications to help you market your brand in Twitter. Now it’s time to build a network/audience in Twitter.
Consider using the following to initialize your Twitter network:
Working with Twitter Search Used with a bit of marketing smarts, Twitter Search is a powerful tool for finding potential customers, audience members, or simply other people worth following in your network.
Basic rule of thumb: to attract followers, simply tweet about what interests them. How do you know what interests them? Go spelunking at their Twitter feeds, and then enter keywords or phrases into Twitter search for typical topics that may interest your potential audience. This is especially helpful if you’re aiming to establish yourself in a niche market: use more of the group’s jargon or vocabulary to further refine your search and arm yourself with a string of keywords you can use.
Working with Foller.me An application that very concretely measures the impact and influence on Twitter, Foller.me is helpful in monitoring your online presence and provide information on how to direct the content you share so that it effectively targets your intended audience and attracts more followers. Twitalyzer gives an overview of how much clout or influence a specific Twitter user has based on statistics like the number of followers, retweeted tweets, and how often the user engages in conversation with his network. Information – The info section shows the publicly available information about a requested Twitter profile. We’ll also show you the user’s join date and timezone among other things. Statistics - These are the numbers. Followers, friends, lists and most importantly the followers to following ratio – something you should definitely watch out for before following anybody. Topics – This section is divided into three sub-sections – topics,hashtags and mentions. Each one is based on the user’s latest tweets. Hover your mouse over the items to see their usage. Inside Tweets – NEW! We take you through the user’s latest tweets and their contents in an easy to understand and short table. Tweets, retweets, tags, replies, mentions, links, media and more. A great way to spot spammers and automated accounts. Attitude – NEW! We scan for smiley faces through the latest user’s tweets and count the happy ones versus the sad ones. Not at all times valuable, but can easily spot emotions. Time – NEW! This section will show you what time the user’s most active at. Not only valuable info about the best time to reach the user but can also spot spammers and automated accounts.
To Automate or Not to Automate? With the many options of social media and the instant, harried lifestyle of today, the idea of automating
tweets and messages is very tempting. Distilling important content to as many people as possible in the least amount of time speaks to our “time is gold” mentality.
While there are several ways to automate without violating Twitter’s terms of use (since most obvious automation options cross the line into spamming), many Twitter leaders caution against automating. The reason: social media’s basic requirement is to, well, be social. That means personally engaging your network in conversation, getting honest feedback, enriched opinions, and so on.
Creating and engaging a network takes time—online or offline. It pays off to take that time.
Does that mean completely throwing away the idea of automation? Certain types of automation are allowed, such as: Tweets that promote your business or website Tweets that give unpaid product or service recommendations Tweets of sponsored links, but they are from companies you approve of If you do choose to automate, always err on the side of caution. Here are some tips: Before any automated tweets, actively engage your followers in conversation or debate. This is to prove you’re not a spambot. Avoid automated direct messages and retweets—this can immediately look like you are spamming people. Don’t retweet links more than once every 24 hours (unless it is a personal blog post). For that matter, avoid retweeting the same tweet over and over. Respond to direct messages or tweets personally. Report spammers you notice in your Twitter feed. If you can’t join them, beat them!
Get your Twitter Marketing under control in 2015 with this daily step-by-step checklist
How To Use Twitter To Build Your Business
PART EIGHT: TWITTER MARKETING PLAN
How to market in under 30 minutes per day Success in network marketing is not a sprint—it’s a marathon.
And when it comes down to it, your daily habits are what’s going to spell success for you in Twitter marketing. But in today’s fast-paced world, you most likely don’t want to spend all your time immersed in Twitter (there’s chores and your day job to worry about too, after all). You need a daily strategy, something that won’t take a huge bite off of your day, but over time will give you a wide network and enormous clout among your followers.
Look for people to follow – 10 minutes
Use Twitter Search Look for the network marketing and inspirational leaders and follow them. Why? Because thousands of people are already following them! You have a ready-made audience for your own tweets right there!
This is more than just a marketing technique, of course. You also want to get a daily dose of inspiration from these folks. They can show you new ideas or ways to employ social media for network marketing, which you can use on your own or as ammunition for retweeting to your followers.
So your objective: find at least 5 new leaders to follow every day.
Get people to follow you – 5 minutes
To maintain your presence in Twitter, tweet at least twice a day. Consider one as the morning tweet and the other as the afternoon or evening tweet. SocialOomph can really help with this task. By using the scheduled tweet function, you can set a morning and evening tweet in one go. You can always add or edit your tweets later on if you feel like it.
Share 4-5 links of interesting, relevant, or inspiring material. This includes your blog posts, if you have them (and you should).
Look for blogs of network marketing leaders or leaders of your chosen industry. Be among the first, if not the first, to comment on each new post. This will get you noticed. If you post good comments, people will inevitably start following you.
Engage your followers - 5 minutes Follow back your followers—assuming they’re real people, of course! Doing so lets you have the means to talk with them and share your interests.
Answer any personal messages you get (as long as it’s from a human). Sometimes something as simple as a thank you can get a conversation rolling. Answer any questions related to your business or industry. This is to set yourself up as an expert on the subject, increasing your influence.
Present your products and business – 10 minutes And now the final touch: once you’ve firmly built up relations with your followers, you should actually try to talk to them about your business. Invite them to look at your landing page and websites, and ask them if they would like to be part of your thriving organization. Highlight the benefits and what support they can expect from you. Don’t worry if you’re seemingly unable to get people to join you all at once. Even the best marketers get more Nos than Yeses whenever they try. If you get rejected, just say “NEXT!” and move on. A guaranteed way to make money using Twitter is to get at least two rejections a day. If you can do more, then so much the better. Two to five rejections is about par, but more is better. With everything you’ve learned so far, now it’s time to put it all together:how to fully utilize Twitter and its powerful reach as a social media tool to enhance your network marketing business.
Tracking and Analyzing Campaigns
With the bulk of information in this post, we’ve established that Twitter can help build your business and network. If you create and execute a consistent, content-rich campaign on Twitter, you can expect solid results of your efforts. How? It’s all a matter of figuring out what criteria/parameters to study and how exactly to enhance them so your business gets maximum promotion.
What do you track exactly?
Tweets and re-tweets. If your tweets are memorable, helpful, or funny, most people will re-tweet it. And others will re-tweet them, etc. You can track precisely how many times specific tweets are re-tweeted or how many re-tweets you get in a day. Click-through rate. This focuses on tweets of yours that were re-tweeted and is a measure of how many people got to see your tweet and actually clicked to it. Followers. Obviously, the more followers you have, the more possible people who can spread your message. Keep in mind it’s not just your followers who will see your message; it will be their followers too. Mentions. Just as catchy jingles can create name recall for a brand or identity, so can mentions on Twitter. Positive mentions are practically word-of-mouth advertisements for others to click through and check out your profile.
Tools you can use The criteria above are the general data gathered. From them you can discover information like sentiment analysis (how people generally feel about a brand) and opinion analysis (comparing tweets to other tweets that mention a brand). It’s also possible to study the tweeting behavior patterns of your followers with the right tools.
Here are a few websites and applications you can use. Most are available for free or have paid-for premium features; you can use one or a few in conjunction with others. What these do is offer some analytics based on various criteria (usually what was mentioned above). Many of these track analytics not just of Twitter but even Facebook or actual website traffic you can generate.
Bit.ly – This URL shortener also has an analytics function, tracking how many times a link was clicked on by Twitter followers. Twitter for Business – allows you to create and track entire campaigns on Twitter. You can schedule launches, promote marketing initiatives, and measure solid results of data accumulated.
Afterword
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit. ~ Aristotle
Network marketing relies on two things: good habits and monitoring. If you do the 30-minute regimen described above, sooner or later you WILL MAKE MONEY. As said before, network marketing is ever and always a numbers game. Stay your course and the law of averages will make sure you will succeed.
Happy tweeting!
Get your Twitter Marketing under control in 2015 with this daily step-by-step checklist
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Vahagn Aris Thank you for reading my posts! If you would like to connect, reach out to me on Facebook.