Are you trying to use twitter as a sales tool? If the answer is yes then you need to look at what and more importantly how you are tweeting.
- Do your twitter feeds look like nothing more than news feeds?
- Are you giving out lots of information but getting little interaction or response back?
- In other words, is your twitter feed increasingly resembling a monologue?
If the answer to any of the above is "yes", you need to make some drastic changes to the way you tweet or you’re wasting your time!
Lets take a regular offline social environment, say a networking meeting: if someone talks to you all the time without giving you the chance to respond, the conversation becomes dull and most likely fizzles out to an awkward silence. The same applies if you fail to tweet in a way that encourages your followers to interact with you.
If you don’t talk to your audience, you don’t have influence and ultimately people will not want to follow you and neither will they share or express any interest in the person and company outside the twitter account.
So how do you interact effectively with your audience on twitter?
Firstly you need to monitor your followers so that you can determine….
- whose conversations are most relevant
- Who yields the most influence and…
- if any fit into similar interests or political/commercial view points.
By monitoring these followers specifically you are more likely to spot when they say something relevant and then you can respond either with a comment in response to what they said or simply by re-tweeting their original tweet.
You can also start your own twitter discussion by asking a thought provoking question yourself either to your whole twitter audience or to a specific person. If you are directing your question at a specific person then don’t forget to include their twitter handle at the end of a question.
e.g. Social media is increasingly being used as a sales tool http://ow.ly/h3db1 @dbermant How do you use it to generate new business?
Using the hashtag #FF (Follow Friday) to commend Twitter followers you rate highly gets followers’ attention and encourages them to follow you more closely. You can also search via the ‘Discover’ tab for relevant discussions that you can participate in or create a hashtag for a discussion topic you are commenting on in order to highlight it to other twitter users. (if you are talking about numeracy in schools, you would use #numeracy)
You need to remember, however, that you should not use your tweets to directly sell but to demonstrate your expertise. It is the knowledge and trust which flows from your comments or responses which encourages a follower to take the relationship beyond twitter to a business or sales conversation.
A prime example of how twitter can work for you is demonstrated by the twitter feed of the personal injury lawyer Brian Barr (see http://www.twitter.com/brianbarrlaw) who promotes himself by asking and answering questions from personal injury sufferers. Although his profile describes what he does, he never actually tries to sell legal services on twitter directly. However by interacting with sufferers he demonstrates his expertise and earns their trust so should they need legal advice or services, he will be at the forefront of their mind.
Finally, getting positive feedback from customers on twitter about your service or product, even if you have to initiate the request for feedback yourself, is also a good way of subtly selling your product or service. An independent recommendation will go a lot further to generate new business than actually trying to sell yourself.
