Is Twitter Right for My Business?
The media is a flutter with Twitter talk these days. From Oprah and Ashton to your local news, Twitter is the hot new thing. According to comScore Twitter is the fastest growing site on the web, growing 131% last month. 
It’s no wonder that marketers and businesses are wanting to capitalize on this explosive growth. Currently 88% of marketers using social media tools like Twitter to grow their business.
Twitter has tremendous potential to revolutionize the way businesses interact with their customers. In fact it already has. When used properly, Twitter can be an extremely valuable marketing tool for businesses, but it’s important to realize that it isn’t right for everyone
Here are some situations where Twitter may not be a good tool for your business.
- You don’t have time to to tweet daily: All social media tools require regular updating, but with Twitter in particular you need to have the time available to engage on a DAILY basis with your audience. Not updating or responding via Twitter in a timely way is the fastest way to fail.
- You aren’t interested in what others have to say: The key to being successful with Twitter is the ability to use it to build relationships. If you are simply tweeting links to your Web site or promoting yourself, no one will listen.
- It’s a numbers thing: If you think that measuring your success amounts to how many followers you have, Twitter may not be the right tool for you. Quality followers who care about what you have to say are much more important than the quantity of people following you.
- You envision Twitter as your be all, end all marketing solution: Sorry, that’s just not going to happen. Twitter is a tactic or tool, it is not a strategy. It needs to work in conjunction with other social media tools and your overall marketing strategy.
- You plan to put Twitter on autopilot: A ton of tools exist that promise they can put your Twitter growth on autopilot and help you grow followers. They are all a bad idea for one main reason: they lack the engagement and interaction that is vital to Twitter.
Now if you plan to use Twitter for all of the right reasons there are three questions to ask yourself before getting started.
- What do I want to achieve with Twitter? What are your goals and what steps are you willing to take to get there.
- What is the message I want to convey? In other words, what are the core of my tweets going to be about? For example, are you a pet bakery who is going to tweet about the pet nutrition along with interacting with pet owners? You must find your niche and what you are going to focus your tweets around.
- Who is going to be doing the tweeting? Figure out who in your business is going to be your voice on Twitter. It’s often CEO’s, Presidents, and other upper level management doing the tweeting but there is nothing to say that you cannot have multiple people within your organization tweeting. Just make sure that everyone is in sync with what, where, when, and why they are doing it.
