Your essential guide to Twitter - Webfactory

What is Twitter?

Launched in 2006, 2 years after Facebook, Twitter is their biggest competition boasting 36 million unique monthly visitors. It’s a social media that is very conversationalist; you can share updates and information to anyone, due to it being far more open than Facebook. You are limited to just 140 characters per Tweet, which makes the information shared far more to the point.

Who uses Twitter?

Over 87% of all people in the world are at least aware of Twitter. Much like Facebook the audience is split pretty evenly between genders, with 52% being women and 48% being men. 57% of Twitter’s audience ranges in age from between 26 to 44 with 48% being college educated.

Is it suitable for your business?

Twitter is adaptable to any business, and is another free source of a substantial audience. It certainly has the power of numbers, an average user has over 208 followers, when something is shared it has the potential to spread out hundreds, thousand and in some case millions of times. Take this year’s Oscars, the host Ellen DeGeneres took a “selfie” of some of the Hollywood stars attending, it was re-tweeted a massive 3.4 million times!

The main reasons audiences have cited for their use of Twitter are:

• It’s really simple to use
• They can follow celebrities
• Catching up on the latest news and updates
• Deals and discounts
• Vent a complaint

Because of the conversational tone Twitter offers it provides a great outlet to really connect with your audience. It will give your brand character and a more personal nature, which customers love. You can get some genuine feedback and use it to send out news on offers and promotions to a wide audience. Another great thing you can use twitter for is spying. Yes you heard correctly. It offers a great opportunity to check out your competition and keep a close eye on what they are doing. You may get some ideas for your own tweets or see things that you might want to avoid doing.

Over 25% of users follow a brand on Twitter, not only this but 67% of those brand followers will purchase that specific brand. So you can see how Twitter offers great marketing potential.

An example of a company’s successful use of Twitter is American Express with over 713 thousand followers. They are right on top with engagement, and reply to tweets good and bad. They are also fantastic at creating successful Twitter campaigns, for example their “tweet your way to savings,” where cardholders could use the hashtag #AmEx to receive a deal. This is a fantastic example of how to use twitter for E-commerce businesses.

How to get started, creating a profile:

Unlike with Facebook where you can create a separate business page from a profile, your business’s twitter account is a profile just like a person. Getting started is super easy too:

• Head to their sign-up page
• Enter your basic information; it will take you through to an easy and quick set-up.
• To get started it will recommend following 5 accounts.
• Followed by 5 more, of well known people, brands etc.
• Then try search through contacts you may know already, using email.
• Upload an image
• Write a little bio about who you are, what you do etc.
• Then you are ready to go, have a play about and get comfortable using it.
• @ Symbol: placing @ in front of a username in a tweet, will include that account, you can include multiple accounts, great when engaging.
• Hashtags #: Are used to search common topics, so if you included #fashion in a tweet, when people search for that keyword then you’re tweet would be included.
• Trends: Trends are the hashtags that are most popular at any given time. If a huge amount of people were including #fashion in their tweets, it would then become a trend. You can see what’s trending on the left of the dashboard. Try use them to your advantage, but make sure it is relevant to what you have to say.

Top Tips:

• Tweet Deck: Tweet Deck is a great tool created by Twitter; it allows you to view all of your feeds at the same time in real time. Another added bonus is that you can schedule tweets and with multiple accounts.
• Respond to negative feedback: It’s always great to get feedback, so you know what you are doing right and what you are doing wrong. But more people will be inclined to tell you what you are doing wrong. Twitter allows people to do this and make it very public. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. You can turn this around. By responding calmly and professionally and attempting to resolve the issue, others will see it too, and will make you look even better.
• Keep it steady: With Twitter moving so quickly, it’s best to keep a constant rate of activity. If you only tweet once in a blue moon, then your tweet will get lost amongst thousands of others and yours won’t make much of an impact.