The art of using twitter for business

Many social media resources suggests that you should invest more in your social media optimization programs, yet they don’t tell you much about how to cater such platforms to your business needs, they would perhaps show you how to register a twitter account, put up a facebook fan page, a youtube channel & maybe show you some successful ( videos ) of campaigns ran by ?others…. but then what?

If you are a designer, lets say a web designer, you open up your sketch book to start brainstorming and putting ideas together to come-up with some sort of wireframes for the project you are working on.
but hang on you wont be able to do so without a sitemap – meh! In order to get a sitemap you’ll have to dig out requirements from the stakeholders, having that in mind this will also help exploring your project’s goals & objectives…

Before jumping in to the social media wildlife you should put yourself in the visitors shoe & think like a customer, what is it in for me to join, what is your value proposition? If you haven’t thought of it yet then start gathering ideas on how to approach it…

get to know your customers & what do they really want.

I came across this lovely infographic what makes people want to follow a brand if you look close enough you’ll notice that reasons are close & almost similar between facebook & twitter.

Using twitter for business is not limited to marketing and promotional activities, depending on the size of your business/organization?there are many ways that you could?utilize?twitter, different departments such as retention, HR, CSR can?benefit?from social media.

I have attended a social media forum in Abu Dhabi few years ago, and it seemed that everyone have agreed that there is not a single blue print on how to approach social media but now as I think of it there is actually a simple prototype which I have named “the 3 important pillars of social media marketing “:

? The outer circle represents the?categorized?type of tweets and the inner ones represents its activities?

1. Sales & Marketing
   this could be anything from your marketing?activities?& programs, engaging social media campaigns such as hashtags or a simple boring push notification.
2. Customer Centric
   Could span from customer support to news about your customers, a simple “how to’s tips” or video screencasts would be nice to have as well.
3. General Info
   PR related tweets, press releases, humanized interactions, personal info etc …

The same can be applied to facebook however, you might need to consider a ?different interaction strategy since facebook & twitter are not the same & as a result you might find that your twitter audience are different from your facebook audience … OK?I’ll keep that for another post perhaps. 🙂

I’am all up for a discussion.