5 Twitter Mistakes Businesses Should Avoid

Twitter is an excellent platform for businesses to interact with customers and promote new products and services and, like most forms of social media, it relies on high quality communication and frequent updates. However, many businesses fail to understand Twitter, and aren’t able to successfully utilise the platform. Learning Twitter etiquette and avoiding some basic mistakes can ensure that a business has an effective presence on the social network.

How to use Twitter for Business Marketing

1) Make Sure It’s Active 

Twitter accounts require a lot of hard work and effort, and some businesses have dedicated staff working on there social media platforms. Although this is not feasible for some businesses, a Twitter account that has been created for the purpose of a few sporadic tweets has no value to customers or potential clients. Very few people will want to follow the feed and will quickly realise that it is an afterthought for the business. The Twitter account should also be advertised by the business on any other platforms that they currently have. Whether it be on the company website or through communication and documentation, a small footer linking to the Twitter account will let customers and clients know that it exists.

2) Follow Users

The quickest way to communicate to customers and clients is to follow lots of other users. New business accounts should follow other accounts that they typically would associate with their type of business. This way, new accounts can make quality tweets that may get retweeted by established accounts which will be seen by other users. It can be hard at first to reach customers directly, but a business following customers in the hopes of getting a new follower will seem strange to the customer. They will wonder why a business has chosen to follow them and read their tweets.

3) Always Be Searching

It is easy to find tweets that mention a business or a brand, even if they haven’t be sent as a ‘Mention’ or as part of a hashtag. The Twitter search function is incredibly useful, and it can be a good way to find tweets that don’t appear in the Twitter feed. It can reveal what customers or clients are saying about the business, and it gives a good opportunity to communicate with them directly if necessary.

4) Strictly For Business

Twitter accounts should always reflect the business they are representing. An account can have a voice and a personality to set it apart from other businesses, but it should never engage in conversations and arguments or have personal quips or anecdotes. This can seem unprofessional, and it may be difficult to affiliate this sort of account with the business.

5) Interact With Followers

Many telecommunication and technology companies use Twitter for customer support. Although they are limited by the 140 character count, they can reply to users with status updates or support. The support may be brief, but it lets customers know that Twitter is a viable and effective way to communicate with the company. As some simple support issues can be resolved by, for example, telling customers that there are national or local issues that are being looked at by engineers, Twitter can be an effective way to manage and deal with customer questions. Always try to reply to customers if there is a professional reason to do so.

Will Kurtz writes on wide range of marketing issues pertaining to both old and new media, always from a business perspective.

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 How to use Twitter for Business Marketing