Tips to Successfully Use Twitter for your Small Business

We all know that Microblogging has become one important tool for promoting business activities. Over the years, since the inception of Twitter many businesses have taken advantage of the platform to expand their operations. For sure, Twitter today stands as one of the biggest and most useful social media platforms on the Web. Nearly every business that is being marketed online makes Twitter a targeted. However, unfortunately not every business succeeds. Why? Simply because even though Twitter is extremely easy to work with, it sure does have some norms that need to be considered before you can garner positive effects from it.

So, if you are a business owner and you want to learn how to exactly use Twitter to promote your small business then here are some tips for you:

Use a separate business profile:

If you run a small business and want to promote it through Twitter then you have two options; either use your personal account or use a special business account. The best way to go by is to use a separate business profile and promote it through your personal profile within your friends and connections. The reason for using a business profile is that other businesses will be able to connect to you easily. It is a trend on Twitter that businesses do follow other business profiles in order to expand their horizons. You can gain the benefit too from this technique!

Keep your Profile Updated:

Similar to your website and the way it works in Google, the same applies to Twitter profile as well. If you want people to keep visiting your business website or else you need to update them with the current news. However, make sure you don’t create hype while selling. This is one of the biggest blunders people can commit while they are using social media for marketing their businesses. Remember, most of the people there are to connect with others and not to buy stuff so as soon as they spot the marketing lingo they would get in the refraining mode. What you need to do is to tweet in a manner which is friendly yet attractive to your followers.

Provide Feedback:

Once you start tweeting through your business account, your followers would show curiosity and ask you about stuff. One major mistake businesses do on Twitter is not to respond to their followers. The best way to keep your followers amused and engaged is to provide feedback to their queries. This way they will know that the profile is being run by an actual human being and not a bot.

Inspire your followers:

Do a little research on Google and see what profiles are most successful. You will come to know that people who have added a bit about themselves and how they found success with their business are the ones with the most followers. You can use the same technique too but make sure you are not overdoing it. It can be a major turn off for your followers if they see you are trying to be edgy.

 

 

Without the use of small business tools, managing the show would be akin to reinventing the wheel. It’s hard enough as it is to run a company without having to do it all by hand and from scratch. For instance, without using small business templates, the businessman would be forced to focus on the aesthetics instead of the actual content of the plan.

The same thing applies to financial planning templates and website design. Not to mention other commonly used tools like spreadsheets designed and ready for various uses like financial statements or balancing checkbooks. There are sample documents, letters and formats available for various functions from B2B contracts to job application forms and independent contractor agreements.

Then there are the checklists. It may seem superficial, but entire businesses have collapsed because there wasn’t a checklist handy when needed. Collect checklists for everything from franchising to trademarks and dealing with the taxman, customer lawsuit or a subpoena. The only option to not having checklists is to keep an expert for each crucial issue close at hand and ready to offer advice, if the business can afford it.

All of this is but only the tip of the iceberg. The real value lies in more complex usage, like customer relations, sales & marketing, HR management and performance analysis. Some of these are freely available, like a tool which helps poll customers and tabulate the survey data into charts and reports.

Whenever there is a task to be done, just head for the search engines or a biz resource site and find a tool to get it done quick and easy. For example, anyone could be forgiven for thinking that there won’t be any tool that helps in selling or buying a company. But there are actually many that can be really helpful, such as valuation calculators which will spit out an instant ballpark figure. This is an incredibly useful tool when trying to research the value of many companies.

Also useful is an HR toolkit that contains everything from job application forms to appraisal forms and employee satisfaction survey forms. There’s no need to mention how hellishly complicated the employee benefits programs are. The time and energy devoted to maximizing tax credits from these programs can be reduced a lot by using the right business tools.

But perhaps the single best use of small business tools is to be found in the marketing & sales department. This is where it is important to use applications to gather metrics and analyze data. This means using worksheets to evaluate the effectiveness of ad campaigns, and calculating the customer acquisition costs. There are telemarketing tools that can push sales off the charts and on track to becoming a not-so-small one.

It’s important here to not turn this article into a laundry list, considering that one page is hardly going to be enough. So let’s just say that before doing anything, remember that there’s already a tool for it. This is true for every aspect involved in running a business, big or small.