30 Days of Social Media – Day 3: 5 Ways to Use Twitter for Business #30DSM

While we only have 140 characters per tweet, that is more than enough for us to connect with our community, to generate conversations, to research, to listen – If we use the characters well.

START HERE:

Listen to this overview of Day 3’s lesson:

5 Ways to Use Twitter for Business

Here are a few of the ways that we’ve used Twitter at the Australian Businesswomen’s Network. I think you’ll be able to use at least some of these ways yourself.

1. Market Research

Last month we were designing a new training program to teach business owners how to go online. I wanted to know what my community wanted to learn from a program like that so that I could deliver exactly what they wanted.

So, I loaded a survey onto the online tool Survey Monkey and then I tweeted that I was looking for women to complete a survey.

Within hours over 100 people responded and told me not only what they wanted, but also praised the work we’d been doing for women (giving me a whole lot of terrific testimonials).

2. Reporting

I am an avid seminar goer and I also take part in online web-based trainings. A number of times now I will take my iphone with me and use the Twitter iphone app (I’m currently using Tweetie) to post LIVE from the event. I recently attended a national small business summit at which Australia’s Prime Minister, senior business people and business thought leaders attended. I tweeted highlights from the conference so that my community could share the best parts of the conference without having to  be there.

3. Media

At the ABN we are often approached by the media looking for women for stories and because we have a big national community we are able to quickly find people for their stories. Earlier this week a radio station was looking for someone who had an organising business to be on their show. I was abel to recommend an ABN member who, while I knew before I folioed her on Twitter, I know better as a result of following her that she’s an expert in this area and that she’d be right for the story.

4. Marketing

When we have a new event coming up I’ll post a tweet to announce the event and link the tweet to a web page or a blog post that further describes the tweet.

NOTE: I do want to say one thing about marketing. Twitter is a two-way conversation. It’s not a way to spam those that follow you (and by spam I mean send irrelevant sales-promotion messages). That sort of behaviour is frowned upon and if you do it too often you’ll lose credibility. Balance your tweets between some that add value, engage others, responses to others tweets and your own self-focussed marketing tweets.

5. Repurposing Content

Like many organisations we publish a monthly eNewsletter. We’ve being publishing newsletters for 15 years and originally we were sending them by mail, but for years now we’ve sent them by email.  While we still use email to distribute our newsletter, the newsletter also lives on our website which gives us a great Twitter opportunity.

Each month when the Women in Business eNewsletter is released I announce on twitter that the issue is available to read – and offer a few snippets of relevant content in the newsletter.

Then, for the next few days that follow, I post a link to a different article in the newsletter.

I am making the content go further and extending the life of the newsletter and at the same time driving traffic to our website where I hope readers will find more useful articles as well as learning abut the other products and services that we offer.

And, if the author of the article is on Twitter, I am certain to include their twitter name in the tweet so that those that are interested in knowing more can follow them.

As you can see while we only 140 characters we can be smart about how we use  them.

TODAY’S ACTION STEP

• How can you use one of these ways yourself? Which one can you implement today, or next week?
• Let me know by adding a comment here, or by tweeting your thoughts (and using the #30DSM hashtag in your tweet)

Until tomorrow,

Suzi

P.S. Getting value from participating in 30 Days of Social Media? Invite your friends to participate. All they have to do is follow me on Twitter and/or Visit this blog and start on the first lesson.