Twitter 101
Four Requirements for a Successful Twitter Strategy
How do you go about establishing your company in a favorable light in the Twitter community? First, you have to provide real value, and be transparent. People want to know exactly who you are so they have a basis for deciding to follow you or not.
How do you define what people think is valuable? There are basically four types of behavior that generate value in a loyal community.
These are:
- Being viewed as a source of quality information by posting links to high-quality content throughout the Internet (i.e. to blogs, how to, white papers and research).
- Rebroadcasting Tweets that have links to high-quality content (i.e. industry related content, breaking news).
- Posting valuable information about yourself and your company (i.e. primers, promotions, coupons, discounts, contest and product information).
- Replying to direct questions, answering user questions, and customer complaints.
The first two items – providing access to content – are about being a member of the community. This is an exercise in building trust and giving. If you are not willing to engage in these two activities it will be very hard to generate excitement about your company. If all you are doing is cranking out press releases, and links to your latest blog posting, it will be hard to generate buzz around your products or company.
The last two items are about developing good will for your company.
Don’t expect instant results from your Twitter initiative. You should expect your strategy to go through these four phases:
- Develop a following.
- Listen and learn about the community.
- Develop content, provide access to content and become an expert source.
- Engage with your community.
Tip: If you want your follower to retweet your message then make sure your text has a “call to action” such as; please take a look… anyone know?… please help!… and what do you think? Links to blogs, links to list and links to free stuff tend to get retweeted more often.
If you want to learn more please contact me at: Mark@MSprague.com or call me at 781-862-3126
Boston-based Lexington eBusiness Consulting at MSprague.com
About Lexington eBusiness Consulting
Mark Sprague’s 25 years of product development experience which includes expertise in Search Engines, Information Products, SEO platforms and Social Networking applications provide in-depth expertise to help you refine products and services, and improve your web sites performance by:
- Understanding your customers search behavior, and normalizing it to your content strategy.
- Developing a superior data-driven SEO strategy for your website.
- Understanding how search engine technology practically impacts SEO and content strategies.
- Understanding how search technology impacts content in a social networking environment.
- Developing a superior user experience based on sound information architecture, usability and coding standards.
