Turn your Twitter followers into real customers

“Show me the money!” Had Jerry Maguire have been a digital marketeer, rather than a sports agent, that infamous quote would apply all the more poignantly. It’s not hard to visualise boardrooms across the nation punctuated by the same question addressed to marketing and PR teams who are spending increasing amounts of time growing their Twitter followers.

This article will address not just the importance of having a Twitter Strategy, but also how to use Twitter as a marketing tool & how to turn your Twitter followers into real customers. A well-defined, and executed, social media strategy should chime – and more importantly help deliver – organisational business objectives. Ostensibly, every business craves customer acquisition and retention. Social media is the umbilical chord that feeds both.

According to Jay Baer, from social and content accelerators Convince & Convert, potential customers are increasingly turning to Twitter for brand awareness. He says, “In addition to following brands, Twitter users research and engage with companies. Forty two percent learn about products and services via Twitter, 41% provide opinions about products and services and 19% seek customer support.”

So how can process industry businesses go about finding the right people to follow and simultaneously bolster their own following?

Four essential Twitter Marketing Tips

Twitter Content Strategy

#1 Unique and original Twitter content

Just as the need for unique, expressive content is important for maximising Google ranking, in the new dawn of the Hummingbird algorithm era, it’s also of vital importance in the Twittersphere – just in a more informal, chatty format.

There are more than 230 million Tweeps (Twitter users) out there, so businesses need to ensure that their tweets add value and provide a unique service or opinion to their Twitter following. Done well, this can lead to greater Twitter following, retweets and sharing of links. All of which are indicators of influence and authority and ultimately demonstrate effective engagement.

Social media monitoring

#2 Twitter Scheduling and Reporting

Historically, one of the key issues that business leaders could point to with Twitter was a lack of qualitative evidence to support its efficacy. As an ethereal marketing entity those sorts of cold, hard statistics just weren’t available for scrutiny. They are now! Social media monitoring tools are available to wider audience - for Free!

Twitter’s rise in prominence has coincided with a symbiotic growth in evermore-powerful analytical tools. One of the most effective is Hootsuite. This fully integrated monitoring, scheduling and reporting site helps businesses to structure their outgoing messaging (with pre-scheduled tweets) and create data rich analytics to monitor the reach and quality of their interactions.

What is a Twitter list?

#3 Using Twitter tools to target the right audience

An effective method of syphoning Twitter “noise” is through Twitter lists and Hootsuite (again). Lists are a means of curating similar contacts into a grouping. Users can manage Twitter lists privately, for one’s own quick reference or publically, which provides invaluable virtual address books to access key target audiences. Another advantage of Hootsuite’s dashboard is the ability to create customised Twitter streams to monitor tweets, including key word phrases such as “process industry” or “Process Industry Forum.” Both are incredibly useful tools for targeted, methodical Twitter relations – as are theme-building “hashtags”.

Twitter etiquette

#4 Good manners still apply in Twittersphere

 

Rules of social etiquette have seamlessly carried over to ‘Twittersphere’. Twitter engagement is a must, you cannot simply ‘Tweet’ at your Twitter following – you need to engage with them. One way is by addressing key contacts directly by using their @someone handle or re-tweeting (basically repeating) their sentiments if they chime with organisational objectives. The point is, recognition can very quickly build reciprocal endorsement.

Twitter as the ultimate marketing tool

Tweeting to the converted…

So, in true Twitter style, in 140-characters here’s why Twitter is the ultimate marketing tool to grow your customer following:

“It connects you to new and existing customers in real time, allowing responsive and effective engagement thus boosting your brand's profile.”