Twitter is the new social media phenomenon, with over 500 million users and over 50 million tweets sent every day -- it's clearly big. Businesses across the world are making fantastic use of the service to promote their services, connect with customers in meaningful ways and explore new opportunities.
However Twitter can be a noisy platform, especially when you're competing with astronauts and celebrities. How can your business which, while exciting and interesting as it is to you, may not capture people's imagination the same way as a photo of Barack Obama and his wife post-election stand out in this crowded space?
Luckily there are countless courses, books, guides, videos -- in fact an entire industry that has grown up around social media marketing -- that can help you. Over at Entrepeneur.com they argue that the simplest way can often be the most effectivre. You need your message to spread further, for that you need people to retweet it -- well why not just ask them? Surprisingly, simple things like putting "Please RT" at the end of the tweet can be remarkably effective.
When it comes to tweeting, as with many things, timing can so often be key. Buffer is a fantastic little service which allows you to queue up items to be posted at various times throughout the day. There is also a useful tracking service that helps you monitor when the most effective and responsive times for your tweets to reach the maximum audience are.
A blogpost by a company called Frog Social Media sums up a very valid point rather nicely by saying "Nobody likes to be "spammed" while they are trying to enjoy talking with their friends and viewing some of their favorite brands Twitter accounts." You need to understand why your clients are on Twitter and not try and force your way into their Twitter experience. Instead participate in the online conversation, tweet about things which although relevant to your business are not just actively promoting it or pushing a sell.
One of the biggest parts of creating a successful Twitter presence that engages people and makes them want to follow you and your brand is humanizing it. Twitter is a place of two-way dialogue and conversation not for robots.
Startup Nation lists seven key steps they believe you should take when setting up your Twitter presence for the first time. Number six is a key one -- if your tweets don't interest you, why on earth should they interest anybody else? Next Level has a good guide to coming up with interesting tweets or if you don't think you can hack it head over to Tweets 123 for inspiration.
Ultimately the key to making sure your business is tweeting in an engaging and interesting way is to insert a human element into your twitter presence. Make sure you ask yourself, would I be interested in this? Is this something I'd choose to read? That way you can make sure that your business has a personality online that is attractive to potential customers.