You tweet regularly and are beginning to build a following for your local business. You’re ready to take it to the next level and truly grow your presence on Twitter and harness the social aspect of social media for your advantage.
So how do you do it?
1. Engage with Your Followers
First, you need to ensure you’re truly engaging in the conversation that’s taking place because of your tweets. Although you should always plan ahead and schedule at least some of your Twitter content, it’s important to remain connected to replies, questions, comments, and re-tweets you receive. Unfortunately, if you don’t respond fairly close to the interaction, your local business may have lost its opportunity to make its maximum impact with its followers. Taking even a couple hours to respond on Twitter can be akin to taking over a day to respond to a client phone call. It’s true you may sometimes get some slack in responding, but it’s best to always attempt to join the “conversation” in as close to real time as possible.
As you can’t sit by your computer each day, there are two ways your local business may stay close to the Twitter chatter. First, you may have a designated individual to check in and respond to comments throughout the day. Or, perhaps, it may be easier to have someone monitor and respond to Twitter via a mobile device. Ultimately, the decision on how you stay in touch with your followers during the day will likely be driven by your type of local business and its needs.
2. Keep Track of Your Brand on Twitter
Second, monitor what is being said about your organization via Twitter. One tricky aspect of monitoring what is being said about your business is all your results may not show up in a traditional Twitter handle or hashtag search. However, that fact doesn’t have to keep you from finding out what is being said. Instead, your local business needs to utilize another tool which can more effectively allow you to search the conversations occurring on Twitter. One tool is Topsy.com. To run a search with Topsy.com input your business name or hashtag and then narrow the search results to Tweets. It’s also possible to set up alerts in Topsy.com to ensure you stay aware of conversations happening about your business. Remember, regardless of how you learn about the comment, it’s important to knowledge and deal with it as quickly as possible.
Also, you can perform social media monitoring with Unified Social. There are several options out there so make sure to check out as many as possible before committing to one.
3. Monitor Activity on Twitter
Finally, it’s important to monitor what causes your followers to engage with your tweets. You have to go beyond just number of mentions. There are several items like re-tweets and comments that allow you to gauge in general what resonates with your followers. However, if you use bit.ly to shrink your URLs, you’ll also be able to review analytics for tweets with bit.ly URLs.
No matter what you do, it’s important to be constantly assessing and approving your follower engagement.
I agree that engaging is important. Doing it as soon as someone makes a comment is nice but it is really hard to be on top of it all the time wen you have a business to run! I have found, however, that conversations spread over a longer period still work – with other business people at least, there is an understanding that you can’t be on Twitter 24/7 so delays in replies are ok.
Quite true. It is important to engage with & monitor the activities on Twitter, but practically it is not possible. But we should make sure that we reply to all the tweets that are present throughout the day. This will definitely help in building your business.
I totally agree with Tash. It sounds wonderful in theory, but in practice, I feel like I need to hire someone to just focus on the social media aspect of things while I focus on generating customers/clients and income. Frankly, I maintain a blog, but no other social media as I don’t want it to simply languish. Does Google+ allow you to manage everything from one place? Does it link blog, Twitter, Facebook all in one?