How do you use Twitter?

I was talking to a switched- on lady the other day about Twitter. I say switched-on as she was an early adopter of Twitter and was telling me how she used to get lots of work from the connections she made on it. She also used to get lots of work from people wanting to know and understand what she did to get her leads. She is in the B2B world but I don’t suppose this story would be much different if she was in B2C.

This lady was telling me how she feels she’s lost her touch now. Although she still has a presence on Twitter, it’s not bringing her leads, or indeed much attention at all.

Do you get leads from Twitter?

So I had a look at what she’s up to and I could see that what might have been working a couple of years ago certainly wouldn’t  be cutting it now. It ‘s the same with anything in business. You can’ t just do it then forget about it. You have to keep working at staying ahead of the pack. In this case, the pack had caught up and taken over.  As Nigel Botterill says, your business is either growing or it’s shrinking, there is no status quo. Well, I believe the same can be said for learning and doing – you’re either improving or you’re falling behind.

Are you ahead of the pack with Twitter?

Twitter, like other social media platforms, is a very crowded place now – it saw an immense increase in popularity about 2 years ago and hasn’t looked back. This means your tweets are competing against a myriad of others for attention and response. Hence, just having a presence there, and maybe sending out a few links, won’t do anything for you any more. You’ve got to get in there with a goal, a focus, an end-point in mind, and make sure that all your activity brings you towards this. You may have several goals and that’s fine- but think about prioritising them.

Make genuine connections on Twitter

So, if you ‘re like me, you might want to be establishing a name for yourself and making genuine connections with the local business community, as well as forging relationships with national and international gurus and influencers in your field. I also target specific communities to offer help and advice and thus demonstrate my core values and expertise. Layered on top of that would be targetting and intervening in specific conversations appropriate to what I might be trying to promote at any given time, for example a workshop or ebook giveaway.

Know your audience on Twitter

But none of this will have any value of course, if you haven’t stopped to consider who your audience is. And don’t just think

‘oh that’s easy, they’re small business owners in Greytown’.

They’re not, they’re real people and although they might happen to run small businesses, they have hopes, goals, ambitions, which, if you can hook into and help them achieve, will raise you in their esteem. They also have fears and problems which your product or service should be aiming to resolve or solve. In order to do any of this though you need to be having real conversations and not just being there for the sake of it.

So, I dare you … take the challenge of taking Twitter seriously … and see what opportunities it opens up for you.