Twitter can help any business in more ways than one.

If you haven’t discovered Twitter yet then you should investigate soon. It may sound like it’s a limited platform, one that’s not going to help you connect with customers – sure, users can post text messages, but only up to a maximum of 240 characters, and they can include up to four images or even add a short gif.

And Twitter has more than 275 million active users every month! Engaging with this massive audience could gain followers for your business. As more and more customers now use social media to influence their buying decisions, so creating a brand presence on different social media platforms, including Twitter, is pretty much a necessity for anyone’s business development strategy.   

Once you’re a Twitter user, you’ll also have the chance to like, share and comment on other people’s posts – just as you can with other social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook. So it’s worth taking another look.

Let’s talk you through 5 steps to make it work

1. Prepare a strategy: Don’t just dive in. Watch some threads initially, see what hashtags are being used that are relevant for your product or service, and watch how people weave these into their content.

Your strategy should then cover what and when you are going to post: quirky, helpful, positive, personal. These elements are key.

Then do your best to stick to the plan. What about holidays? Well, get a colleague to post using your regular hashtags while you’re away; or post yourself, only less often – after all you are on holiday. Even better you could use one of many tools to schedule your posts in advance. Scheduling tools are very good for managing standard content posts in terms of both planning and reducing time spent getting into the “zone” to post.

Also understanding that this is a communication medium too, which means it’s 2-way, will users be really interested in your broadcast. Consider using the medium as a means of identifying opportunities and then reaching out to those who have those needs or have expressed a particular want. This takes us back to Marketing First Principles of establishing a need someone has and being able to service it.

An example could be if you’re an appointment or bookings led business with a late cancellation for a chiropractor or hotel venue then you can get your message out very quickly with a discounted offer to recover the business lost.

2.) Present your brand: Your Twitter account should represent your brand, so ensure the topics you tweet about, the timing (frequency more than time of day), and your tone all reflect your brand positively. Also, if your brand colours are red and white, use these colours in your profile. Your Twitter account name should also be related to your brand name.

3.) Use Twitter chats: Don’t just focus on follower numbers. More followers mean greater awareness, which is almost always good (unless you’ve got lots of fake followers). But if you want to leverage your brand on Twitter, then get active and engaged with your followers using Twitter chats.

These are public conversations around one unique hashtag. Just search for the hashtag and participate in the conversation. Once you join the discussion, you’ll be engaging with active users in real time. Your participation lets these other users know that your business exists and if you provide meaningful comments, they’ll check your profile and perhaps follow your page.

There are always a lot of discussions on Twitter, choose one that fits your product or service. For example, if your business sells activities to tourists then join a discussion about the region you’re based in, or the activities you offer.

4.) Plan ahead: If you want your tweets to be liked, commented on and shared, plan ahead for relevant dates, events or anniversaries. Decide some key hashtags beforehand and tweets that are tied to the topic, so that you can relax a little, monitor activity on the day and join discussions. Don’t forget to seed the event in tweets ahead of the main date. See earlier too for using planning tools for strategy.

5.) Twitter videos: Video is now essential in every channel you market on. Use videos to explain complex information or showcase your product, ideally in a fun and innovative way.

You don’t need to download an app to post a video on your Twitter profile. Use Twitter’s native video feature to record up to 140 seconds and directly upload this to your Twitter stream.

Twitter dropped Vine (6 second video) in favour of Periscope, a live streaming app owned by Twitter, your live streams will show up on your followers’ news feeds. The video will be recorded and can still be viewed once the stream is over. Facebook have their equivalent with Facebook Live.

It’s All Worth It

Regardless of your market’s size, Twitter can easily connect you to a relevant audience. But stick to the strategy and be careful.

A quick tweet can be sent in a moment, but its message can go ‘viral’ even faster, and a strong negative reaction to an ill-considered attempt at humour, or any message that is clearly off-brand, and your followers can abandon you, or worse promote their anger or frustration at your expense.

They used to say there’s no such thing as bad publicity. There could be… stick to your brand values.