Twitter is an invaluable tool for any organisation, whether it is a charity, SME or a large corporation. Its free, wide reaching and can help you skip steps in the sales process. If you aren’t on twitter here are 5 reasons why you should be:
1) Information
News travels extremely quickly on twitter, for example most of the twittersphere knew that Osama bin Laden was dead before CNN did! It is also an excellent curation tool; if you follow the right people they will tweet out information that is of use to you, which you can then retweet to your followers with maximum impact and minimal effort on your part.
2) Research
Imagine going to a meeting with one of your clients and not knowing about a news article about their company that they recently published on twitter. In 2013 it would be an inconvenience… by 2014 it will be disrespectful and show a lack of preparation. It is an excellent way of getting inside your clients head to find out what they like and dislike, what topic they are retweeting as this is obviously going to be of interest to them and to start a rapport or use it as a topic for a blog entry.
3) Promotion
Use twitter for promotion cautiously. People do not like to be sold to on twitter and twitter themselves take a very poor view of it. You can however promote events, such as conferences or a charity event. You could talk about end of year figures if you are especially proud but it should not be used for constantly tweeting about yourself. Think about what your clients will be interested in hearing, and think carefully.
4) Trust
It is a fantastic way of gaining trust, for example if you are an expert at employment law then you could be tweeting interesting changes to the law, commenting on relevant things that engage with your clients and add value to them so that people see you as being an expert in your field. This will translate into something called a Klout Score which calculates your influence on social media. (you can find out more about it here http://klout.com/home)
5) Connecting
It is a brilliant way of skipping the first level of cold calling. By tweeting on others tweets and making your name visible to them they will usually be much warmer to receiving your primary level of contact, whether this is connecting on LinkedIn or a phone call. You never know, they might even start the dialogue with you!
To get started why not just sign up and follow people or as we call it ‘Lurking’, then when you are more confident start to retweet things to others tweets and reply to them, slowly move up to tweeting original tweets.
All in all Twitter is a powerful tool that shouldn’t be wasted.
