10 Ways to Use Twitter For Business

by Joshua Botello

If you avoided using Twitter for your business up until now, let's start with some numbers:

• There are 48.35 million monthly active Twitter users in the US.
• 38% of Twitter users are between the ages of 18 and 29, 26% of users are 30-49 years old.
• 56% of Twitter users $50,000 and more in a year.
• 80% of Twitter users are affluent millennials.

If you haven't started using Twitter because it is just a “never-ending wall of noise” and you don’t “get it”. Fear not. Here are 10 ways you can easily use Twitter for your business.

#1 Promote Your Blog

If you aren't blogging for your business. You should consider starting immediately. If you are, congratulations, it's time to amp that up on Twitter. You can promote your blog with several strategic tweets that are scheduled out to give your blog the maximum traction it needs. How? You can schedule out 5 tweets in this example from Neil Patel, to get eyes on your blog and keep it fresh without repeating yourself and being spammy.

#2 Customer Service

Nowadays, all major brands are using Twitter for customer service. So why aren’t you?

Using Twitter for customer service is a quick and inexpensive way to broadcast issues or quickly identify issues without the hassle of phones or email with built-in Twitter functions. Using a dedicated customer service Twitter handle for your business or a simple @mention can make it easy to filter out customer service requests.

Here are some tips:

1. If there’s an issue address it quickly 1 hour or less

2. If its widespread use @replies for broadcasting or

3. Use Direct Messages (DMs) to address individual needs

4. If you are communicating personal information then use email or phone for secure contact

#3 Twitter Chats

A relatively new phenomenon is Twitter chats. These are literal conversations with a single “host” and the other followers of the Twitter chat. The chat is identified by a # usually ending in chat like #SMEchat for Social Media Examiner’s monthly chat with their followers.

The idea is to get feedback and have a conversation with your audience or influencers to glean valuable insights or topics for future content. Twitter chats can drag out for a week or so with your company getting great exposure spikes every month. Check out the example below.

#4 Images

Ah, images. Remember when taking pictures of your food and tweeting what you were eating? Leave that all that behind. Instead of taking pictures of random things, aim your lens at showing off your products, a new design your tinkering with, an event you are attending, or GIFs and memes. Using GIFs and memes can illustrate a mood or capitalize on a trend in a fun and quirky way that can resonate with your audience. See this one I whipped up in 5 minutes:

#5 Videos

I’ve been in the video space for a while doing promos, music videos, projects, and regular content videos. This isn’t to brag. It’s to illustrate that you can use all of these examples of types of videos to post to twitter. The limit on the length to 140 seconds (2 minutes 20 secs) and may not seem like a lot, but if the Superbowl commercials can get their message across in 30 sec then 140 seconds is plenty of time.

#6 Live Streams

If the thought of public speaking scares you, then live streams may not be for you, and that's ok. If you are looking to engage with your audience in real-time and boost your exposure with the tap of a finger, then let's continue.

Live streams are broadcasts over twitter through their live stream function or their companion app Periscope to speak with your followers in real-time. So what? Now you have a platform to speak with them and get their immediate feedback, ask for their opinion, show backstage at events, and more.

#7 Q&A

Similar to the way you can use customer service for Twitter, answering frequently asked questions on twitter is a great way to interact with your customers. Better yet, having links to those answers and being able to reply to those instead of typing out the same answers to those questions will make your life a lot easier.

#8 Live Tweeting

Have you ever missed an event you wanted to go to but can't? Enter live-tweeting. This the act of using twitter to document an event as it happens. Here are some best practices:

• Announce when you plan to start live-tweeting an event. You can let people know ahead of time what you will be tweeting. Also, let them know when you are done.
• Use an official hashtag for the event for people to track and comment on.
• Use pictures and videos to illustrate what it is like to be at the event.

Check out an example from the 2019 WWDC conference from Apple.

#9 Contests

Contests used to be a great way to build your following by offering goodies for your follows and retweets. They are still a powerful tool to not only build your following but also give back loyal followers with gifts to show your appreciation.

Contest used to be the "Wild West" when it came to contests, but since Twitter has tightened up the rules for running different kinds of contests it has created a new space. There are whole firms and apps dedicated to running contests with specific goals in mind like creating engagement or building leads.

#10 Polls

Twitter supported polls have come to fruition. Long gone are the days of throwing out a question and manually counting out all of the replies and compiling them into any type of discernible list of meaningful data. So what can you use them for? Well here’s a list from Twitter:

• Find out about trending topics
• Ask for feedback that helps your business
• Discover product preferences
• Ask lifestyle questions that tie back to your business

There are 10 ways to use Twitter for business. You can start to shed your fear of the unknown and dive in. Remember, you don’t need to employ all of these to crush it on Twitter, but every little bit helps. How have you used Twitter for your business? Let me know down in the comments. Good luck tweeting!

Funded in part through a Cooperative Agreement with the U.S. Small Business Administration. All opinions, conclusions, and/or recommendations expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the SBA.