5 tips for growing a small business using Twitter

Many small businesses and emerging brands don’t see twitter as a platform where they can promote what they sell. Those who see it as such platform don’t know how to go about it. A few retailers, marketers and salespersons who understand the wildfire effect of being able to put up a strong brand on twitter and sell it to the existing crowd of an audience are getting amazing results.

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Twitter is a marketplace

We are all there to sell something; a product, an idea, a service, or simply ourselves. Twitter is today’s fastest growing and most talked about social media site. For a small and medium scale enterprise, there are immense benefits in building a twitter presence for your business. According to The following are 5 tips to supercharging your business using twitter:

Make a profile

Your profile is your entry point into any business relationship on twitter. The 1st thing your customer buys is your profile. Fill out your profile completely, providing a clear description of your business, and a link to your company website. It is also okay to setup multiple0 twitter accounts for different units of your business e.g Customers service, marketing etc. The major elements of your profile include username, Photo, username, header, bio and pinned tweet. You don’t have to write a novel. A short (max 160 char), compelling, intelligent and optimized bio will make a great profile. Make your profile findable by optimizing it with hashtags related to your industry included in your bio.

Your profile photo should carry your business logo (or a headshot of you), with a size of 400 x 400 pixels. The header section of your profile is a massive real estate (size 1500 x 500 pixels) to visually impress your brand on your customers and audience. Use the space and tell your story in the most compelling way you can find. Your username must incorporate your brand name, be straightforward, as short as possible, and easy to remember. Add your username (handle) to your online and offline materials to promote your page. Pinned tweets help you put your best foot forward by highlighting your best content and tweets and pinning them to your profile page.

Listen and learn

You don’t start by posting so much. Start by searching for industry leaders in the sector you have large followership and listen to what they are saying, how they are saying it and who they are saying it to. Follow them and ask for following back. Also, search for people and organizations you have relationships with. Follow them and tell them to follow you back and retweet your content. Bit by bit you will begin to build a large enough community around your brand.

Share and show some care Keep you tweets conversational. Start retweeting other contents that are relevant to your industry. Search for your company name and product line and find customers with problems. Solve them! Ensure what you share is relevant to your audience per time. Talk about your industry, products, processes, people and plans. This will help in giving your customers a sense and feel of being an important part of how you do business.

Create and sustain attention

People will always be attracted to free things. There lies the trick to creating attention the attention you need to grow your brand on twitter. It does not stop with making a profile and crafting tweets, you must make an indelible impact. You will never make such impact if your tweets are not relevant and do not stir up a conversation. Tweet conversationally, ask questions, create contests and start a Hashtag discussion thread (a keyword that starts with the # sign). Start a blog on your business website and share your posts on your twitter timeline. You can use various tools to auto tweet your old blog posts to ensure that your followers are constantly kept entertained with your content. This will help in not just creating attention but also sustain it.

Promote it

Ensure you feature your twitter handle on your other social media pages and your website. You should also promote it in your products, training slides and by using word of mouth in telling your friends and business associates.