Twitter for Business: Is It Right For You?

Part 1 of The Social Media Strategy Series

Welcome to the first episode of The Social Media Strategy Series, where I devote an episode to each of the major platforms to help you decide whether or not they will be good for you and your particular business. Your business is unique, as is the audience you serve. So my goal here is just to give you some criteria and considerations so that you can make a good business decision.

In each episode, I’ll cover the character and philosophy of each platform, its potential benefits and pitfalls, particular idiosyncrasies or restrictions of each platform that might affect you, and the actual strategies that I use in my own business serving clients.

Naturally, I’ll start with Twitter. It’s my best channel, by far (see: @mboezi). And I believe that despite some of the recent hand-wringing you may have heard, it’s still the most effective channel for building an audience. Once you listen to the episode, I think you’ll understand why.

In this episode, I cover:

• What are the benefits of using Twitter for audience-building, if you get it right.
• What are the potential pitfalls, including how to manage the “firehose” of posts.
• How to find the right blend between broadcast and bi-directional activity.
• How to find people to connect with—either directly or indirectly.
• How images and videos boost your click-through rate (CTR)—especially native images.
• Using lists to help keep you organized—and be strategic about audience-building.
• How you can do some clever automating with Twitter—if you’re careful.
• A brief rant about auto-DMs. Spoiler alert: It’s spam.
• Using Twitter’s Analytics to measure performance and iterate.
• And a bunch of other strategies for engaging with an audience.

Because I love Twitter so much, I went on longer than expected. I intend for the rest of the series to be small, bite-sized segments—so that you can take a quick tour, get the pros and cons, and get back to work.

I hope you find this to be a helpful overview. If you’re not using Twitter for business purposes, try it. Give it an honest effort. If you have been using it but find that it has not worked for you, try some different things until it “clicks.” Hopefully this episode will give you some ideas of how to do that.

Listen here or subscribe in iTunes.

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Show Notes

In the episode, I mentioned a social media management tool called Audiense. It’s a paid tool, but I’ve found it to be the most effective one for audience-building with Twitter.

Here’s the complete list of all the tools that I use regularly in my own content strategy. I’ve complied it in one document that I keep updated fairly regularly. It’s called the Content Strategy Toolset, and you can download it here.

Specs for “native” Twitter images: 1024 x 512. This is the optimal size. Here’s a good, up-to-date cheat sheet for the major social networks.

My article on learning to use Twitter as a marketing tool: How to Build an Audience on Twitter.

And a brief 3-part video series I produced to get deeper into the nuances. Here are the individual posts:

• Twitter Basics: Finding the Right Content Mix
• Twitter Basics: The Etiquette of Following and Following Back
• Twitter Basics: Direct Messages

Or you can watch them all in my YouTube playlist. Enjoy!