There seems to be much discussion and hype at the moment regarding the use of social media for business and most specifically how Twitter (arguably the hottest property on the online social scene) can be leveraged. Yet despite, or maybe because of these articles, I see people making the same mistakes over and over again. With that in mind I wanted to put forward a few ideas specific to the business use of Twitter

1) Remember where you are. Twitter is a ‘conversation’ a chat room if you like. It is not a notice board on which to pin your message, it’s not ¬†somewhere to post status updates as you might do on LinkedIN or FaceBook, it is all about getting involved in conversations. Not strictly really time – as some users may read your messages later on, but essentially should be thought of as a ‘now’ medium. Think of Twitter as a room full of people, perhaps a networking event. Set about engaging people in discussion. Use your social skills, ask their opinion and show interest in their point of view. Unfortunately if you lack social skills your are likely to fail on Twitter. Giving you social skills is obviously beyond the scope of this article! You can not automate the creation of relationships, it has to be done by humans.

2) Plan and vary your communications. Even though it is a chat room, you still need to treat Twitter as a formal media and consider your conversation and points in the same way that you apply PR / marketing common sense to your other business communications. Probably the biggest mistake I see time and again is people that constantly post links to their blog or website. Posting links occasionally (especially framed in a dialogue seeking question) is fine, but sometimes you should entertain, sometimes you should participate and other times contribute to other peoples discussions. Always present a consistent character but vary which aspect of that character you present.

3) To follow or not to follow that is the question. Actually the answer is very simple follow everyone and anyone you can! Naturally, if you discover someone is a total moron then dump then and probably block them too, but other than that do not ‘qualify’ or try and profile your audience. If you communicate around a consistent character your followers will ’self select’ so basically you need to throw as many people as possible at this automatic filter. Depending on your market, it may be possible to improve your “follow” strategy by¬†identifying¬†other users that already have the profile of following that your business requires and simply try to attract their following to follow you too. You can only follow 10% more people than are following you, or 2000 people, which ever is the greater. So in your quest to build as big a following as possible, as quickly as possible, you can not afford to keep following people that do not follow you back. Managing followers can be automated. Also the concept of having a small tightly focused group of followers may be very nice and fluffy if you are using Twitter for personal use, but as a business tool you need a BIG following. Just like sales in the real world social media marketing is a numbers game.

4) Be present. Twitter is a community, so you need to drop in regularly and post regularly. At least once a day should be considered an absolute minimum.

5) Battles and Wars. Twitter is not the end game, it is simply a ‘meeting place’. Therefore you need to have a path along which people can progress in order to develop their relationship with you. Probably the biggest mistake here is people trying to force traffic! NOTHING will kill your chances of success quicker than trying to force traffic. So if you are tempted to offer an eBook through an auto responder don’t. If you are constantly asking people to visit your blog don’t. Use the link in your profile as a conduit for *INTERESTED* people to choose to discover more about you.

Very quickly we will see more tools and many hunderds of thousands of new people using Twitter. It is an important tools in the social media toolbox. Now is the time to figure out how to leverage it for your businesses. If you need help developing your social media strategy, or simply need to outsource the execution of it, my company n3w media would be delighted to hear from you.