How To Use Twitter To Grow Your Business

Would you like to know how to use Twitter to grow your business? I would. That’s why I went to Michelle. She is then awesome. Hundreds of thousands of followers that we call on Twitter? So Michelle is going to teach us all about that. How to use Twitter to grow your business. as a social media strategist and speaker, one of the questions that I most often asked is, is Twitter dead? and every time someone says that my heart breaks just a little. Because in 2008 when startup princess released started in social media and Twitter was one of the first players on the scene, we really loved and enjoyed Twitter and through the course of the time that we’ve been able to spend on Twitter, we’ve gone from zero followers to three hundred and twenty-six thousand followers. Into this day, Twitter is still our number one source for traffic to our sites. And the number one source of listens for our podcast. But Twitter is so much more than just sharing little tips and tricks and information so today I want to share with you how you can use Twitter to grow your business. So Twitter is not just about creating individual tweets. The reason why Twitter has worked for us and many other companies and individuals is because they’ve used Twitter to build a sense of community in that one simple platform.

Now building a sense of community works in any type of social media platform but one of the things that I love about Twitter is that it’s easy and quick to build an audience and to respond to individuals. It’s easy to have a specific kind of conversation and it’s easy to bring many people in to have one conversation at one time and I that’s one of the things that I love. If I can throw out a question on Twitter and I get seven or eight or nine responses immediately and then people are responding to each other and sharing different ideas, then we really have filled that sense of making Twitter and extension of our startup princess online platform. It’s a place where people can connect and people can grow. But it goes above and beyond startup princess because it works for my speaking business as well. It’s a great place for me to connect with other speakers. A great place for me to connect with media outlets and journalists and also a great way to find individuals that are looking for little quick information. In other platforms, they can be caught into a long post or a long video or long other something else but in Twitter they can quickly interact and get information that they need and you can still use the four types of social media status updates that we talked about in our hero video on how to create content for social media. So go find that because those four types of social media status updates apply in Twitter and they work really really well. So share great content. Let people interact with you. Interact with them by responding. Thank people for retweets. And building that sense of community comes because you feel accessible as a business and as a brand. Now as you consider building a sense of community, one of the things that’s important is creating consistency because nothing kills a sense of community of being there one day and then being gone for weeks at a time. Now some people wonder how often should I be posting on Twitter to keep that sense of community? The answer is, it depends. People hate that answer for me because they want me to give them an individual number. But the truth is, is that you can post so many more times on Twitter than you can in almost any other outlet. Peg fixed Patrick who is a social media strategist I love to follow says that the life of the tweet is about 15 minutes so quite frankly, you could be posting every 15 minutes. Now whether your business is large or small, you may not be able to handle three or four hundred tweets in a day but you can create a system and strategy that people can come to expect. On average, we post about 10 tweets a day and both individually on my personal speak Michelle and also on Startup princess. Sometimes we’re only at about 4 a day if things are really busy but we’re consistent in sharing content and information and we’re also consistent in sharing what we’re up to so that it’s not just content content content all the time they’re also getting pieces of us. Now when I interviewed social media and marketing strategist’ and handli on my podcast, she talked about how important it is to share information about you. And she said, but there’s a difference between being personal and being personable. And she said that, some people in a way to build a sense of voice or to build a sense of a brand they share many personal things through their social media outlets. How this tip applies above and beyond Twitter but we’ve used this the most on Twitter where people will be sharing lots of tips advice and information and then they’ll also share about their personal lives as well and that can be done too much. Now people want to know that your personal, person, human. They want to know that you do things above and beyond your business they want to know that especially if you were the one who is tweeting nine times a day that you do more than just punch the clock at work. They want to know what your other outside interests are. However, you can tip people in an opposite direction. You need to be aware of polarizing conversations. We learned early on that we can’t talk politics, that will quickly divide our audience and that while we do want to share small business advice and information and tips and tricks for entrepreneurs all over the world, if we delve into political conversations, we’ll lose followers. And while that is a piece of our personal personal individual things, it doesn’t have to be a way that we are personable through our business. And likewise, I also heard a story of the boutique that cute cute boutique that has awesome clothes, had a great following, and she started sharing pictures of her dog in her boutique and people stopped going to her boutique and she didn’t know why. But some people love dogs and some people don’t. There’s two types of people in this world. Those who love dogs and those who judge you for how much you love your dogs, right? And all joking aside, one of the concerns that happened is that people were wondering if the dog was running in and out of the clothes, some people are allergic to dogs, and so they didn’t know if dog dander was getting on clothing and then coming home. And so while she felt like she was sharing a person part of her and she probably could have still shared her love for dogs but sharing the dog within the store caused a problem for the brand. So be careful about that line between being personal and being personable that really affects things on Twitter because people want to know you. People want to know that today I’m shooting videos and so I’ll share a picture or two of me shooting videos. But they also want content from me and they want tips, they want quotes, they want advice, they want information, and they want to build a sense of community and so they want a place where they can ask questions and get questions answered. So that is a really important part about building your business through Twitter. Now whether you choose a hundred times a day, or ten times a day, again that consistency is important and you can use tools like HootSuite to help share your messages and you can also use assistants to schedule that content for you. Well, I feel like especially as a small business you should never outsource your voice, you can outsource this system. So if you’re, if you know that you want to use Twitter because it’s great for link sharing, it’s great for podcast, it’s great for technology companies, is also great for media, it’s great for speakers, it’s great for podcast, so many great ways that you can utilize Twitter in your business but you don’t have to do it all yourself so it’s okay to outsource pieces of that just make sure that your voice is clear. Now in some companies, you’ll have multiple people tweeting. So just establish a routine for what it’s going to look like. Big brands like JetBlue will have people use the up dash and then it will say JB for the initials of that person so that people know that someone is tweeting on behalf of a big brand. And so just make sure they have multiple people tweeting that it’s clear. When Kelly and I are both tweeting I do “-Michele” and she does” – Kelly” so that people know when Michele’s talking and when Kelly’s talking. Sure there’s an overall voice for the brand but people want to know if they’re talking to an individual or a business and what kinds of messages are coming so just make sure that that voicing is clear as you build a Twitter strategy. Now there’s one other thing that I want to share with you about building a consistent Twitter strategy in a community that will help your business grow and that is the use of hashtags and also Twitter chats which have been one of our favorite things to use on Twitter.
From the very beginning, we did Twitter chat. We were on some that other people did we also hosted many series of our own through startups chat and we participated in many others since. We love Twitter chats because they’re a great way to interact with audience, members, who may or may not follow you on a specific subject. If you’ve never participated in the Twitter chat I’m going to recommend a couple to you to follow so that you can see how they’re done and you can also see how they interact with their audience and brand in a bigger way so that people are drawn to building the sense of community with you through Twitter. One of my favorites is through a company called Mahmut forward and they do Tuesday night #GNO chats every single week and it’s just #GNO. And if you follow on it forward consistently every Tuesday, they will do a Twitter chat. And it’s, they’ve got moms from all over the world who will chime in on every conversation to creativity with kids to success principles with parents to avocados and everything in between. And I love how they build this brand and not just the sense of community that other moms feel like they can come and have a Twitter chat and the girls night out right online and social media from wherever they are in the world, but they’ve also figured out how to involve brands and monetize their Twitter community so tha might be an option for you. But know that there are Twitter chats in every single industry. There’s often a speaker chat that I can follow, there’s a small biz chat, so whatever industry you’re in go in and find and just do some searches for hashtags that work. Now above and beyond participating in specific Twitter chats with specific hashtags, the hashtag strategy can also take one step further. Now hashtags, if you’re new, is a way to link conversations. So for example, in my world I do a lot of #success. People are interested in tips, quote, advice, tools that will help them with success. I also use the #smallbiz a lot. Now I didn’t create that hashtags but people started using it and if you click on it, you can see every single tweet that was ever created both the top tweets and the most recent on that conversation. And so it’s great to participate in bigger chats and conversations that are already happening because even if they don’t follow you, if they click on it, they might see you and that’s one way that we’ve grown our following. We’ll talk about that more in another video. But what I love about creating hashtag conversations and participating in those is but above and beyond being able to create and grow your following you’re also able to have really deep conversations around one specific topic of conversation. And as much as I love to create and follow conversations that are big like small biz, or success, or whatever industry you’re in, the other thing that’s interesting is that you can also create some hashtags of your own that people can follow. We have a hashtag called SPDisneyland. Any time we go to Disneyland, we share tips and advice about how Disney created a platform that you can follow as a small business. So you can go see all of the tweets that we’ve ever done over the years in SP Disneyland. That’s just one example but you can create some of your own. I created one for my book, #makeithappenblueprint. And so then, everything around my book is connected through that one hashtag. So don’t just participate in hashtag conversations, start some hashtag conversations of your own and as you continue to use those in the days weeks months and years ahead, as people connect with you through that one topic of conversation, they’ll have content that lasts above and beyond what you do just today or just tomorrow or just next week. So I’m just getting so excited there’s so much to share about Twitter but I hope this will help you get started as you consider using Twitter to grow your business. Have a great day! Thanks for watching Hero TV today. This was all about Twitter and guess what? We’ve got a part 2. So stay tuned. Be sure to subscribe because there’s another about how to grow your following on Twitter. Remember to live on purpose, make a difference, and be the hero.