5 Reasons to Use Twitter to Market Your Business

KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCASTTwitter is still growing and has a considerable number of followers. It has 300 million active monthly users worldwide.Twitter offers a variety of media for your content. You can write posts, put up images, use GIFs and videos. You can also stream live using Twitter.Bots and spammers are no longer able to contribute using Twitter due to new rules on the platform. This creates a better stage for your content.Hashtags are used on Twitter to organize conversations. Trending hashtags can be followed by viewers.Following, retweeting and commenting on your follower’s updates creates notifications for them. This helps you get the conversation started between you and your audience.Do you have 100 Twitter followers? You could be retweeted by someone with 500 or more followers. This creates a larger audience for you!Always respond when someone starts a conversation with you. This is critical for keeping the conversation going between you and your audience.THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…Social media is just as personal as face-to-face contact. Don’t discount social media as being just another tool to learn on a computer screen. Instead, use social media to create relationships with those who you may not have met otherwise. And lean into Twitter, which I firmly believe is the best tool to use to make connections and start conversations.HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN'T MISSReason #1: Twitter is still growing! – 04:34Reason #2: Twitter is more than just words – 05:35Reason #3: Twitter is a trend-setter – 07:40Reason #4: Twitter is the one of the most powerful engagement tools available – 08:39Reason #5: You can get in front of a large audience via Twitter! – 11:55Transcript below Hello there and thank you for joining me for episode number 15 of the Social Media Marketing Made Simple Podcast. And I am your host, Teresa Heath-Wareing.As always, I am ready to share some tips, tools, tricks, strategies with you on how you can improve your social media marketing for your business. So whether you are a business owner, entrepreneur or a social media marketing person and you are looking for more some more tips and tricks in order to get more engagement, drive more traffic and ultimately to use social media to help you sell your products or service, then you are in the right place, my friend, and I am here to help you.One of the things I love about social media more than anything is the fact that it can bring you together with people that you may not have known, or they may not know about your products or service. And you're able to have conversations with them.I think I've mentioned before that I started marketing 14 years ago. And when I was doing marketing then, there was no two-way conversation. If we wanted to find out about a customer or what they liked or what they didn't like, it was a huge effort. It would be using things like focus groups, questionnaires, picking up the phone and speaking to people. Things that were a lot of hard work and also cost a lot of money, just to find out about your customer.Now, the way the world has gone with social media and with everything being so digital, is that people think the world has become more and more distant. That we're just talking to screens. Just looking at phones. Just doing everything on our computer. And you're losing the personal side of marketing and selling. But actually, that's not the case at all. If you look at the really successful marketers, they are the people who are getting to know their customers. And not just getting to know them, i.e., what age they are, whether they're male or female. I mean getting really under the skin of these people. Asking them what they like, what they don't like. Listening to the words they use and being able to take that information and market directly to the same sort of people.Also, as a business owner, I love the way that it got me in touch with other people. People that knew what I was going through. People that could help me with certain things. I've been able to make some connections that I still have today that I made purely through social media. It's really funny when you say, "How did you meet?" "We met via Twitter." It sounds a little bit odd. Or, I know them from Instagram. It sounds like they're not real people, but actually these connections are just as strong and just as powerful as the ones I met over a breakfast meeting in the early days.So today I wanted to talk you through one of my favourite tools for connecting with people and engaging with people. Now, when I mention Twitter, people are gonna be like, "Oh, really?" So the reaction I get with Twitter every time is either they don't get it. They really don't get it. They've tried it, they don't understand it, they don't know how to make it work for them. Or, they think that this is an old social media platform that no one's using and actually it's going to die off tomorrow. Which isn't the case at all.So today I am here to tell you how wonderful Twitter is and why you should still consider it as one of the profiles that you use to market your business. Twitter is entirely about engagement. If you're going to use Twitter to literally post and shout at the world, then absolutely it's not gonna do anything and it's gonna be a big waste of your time. But, if you are in the business to business arena ... Now, it's not to say that business to consumer doesn't work. However, it's particularly effective for business to business people. Then if you're in that arena and you want to make real connections and speak to real people and start to build up a relationship with people, then actually Twitter is a fantastic way to go about it.And one of the great things about Twitter is it's so uninvasive. It's so relaxed as an approach that it doesn't feel salesy whatsoever. As long as you treat it that way. But I'm here today to tell you the five things that I love about Twitter and why you should use it. Reason #1: Twitter is still growing! Reason one. Now this is gonna surprise you, I'm sure, but Twitter is still growing. It still continues to grow and has done for a long time. So even though it might not grow at the speed of the others and it might not have as many users or followers as the others, it is still growing and it still has a considerable amount of followers. Worldwide, Twitter has on average 300 million monthly active users. Now that's a fairly big pond of people to go at if you're looking to connect with people.Also, the other thing that you might not know about Twitter is often they come out with the really cool ideas first. But I think, personally, this is my opinion, but I think that as a company they probably don't have the money that Facebook has. Therefore, Facebook will see something inventive that Twitter's done, like the fact that they did live streaming first. Then, they do it so much better. And that's why Twitter sometimes gets left in the dust when you look at how good some of the platforms are. Reason #2: Twitter is more than just words Reason two. You can use a range of medias on Twitter. So obviously all the different social medias have their own kind of thing. i.e., Instagram is all about images. YouTube is all video. Twitter actually offers a range of medias in which you can put out your content. So, they've obviously now increased the word count so you can have a lot more words, which helps. But unless you're going to write really long posts, then Twitter can be perfect for you. You can write posts. You can put up images. You can use GIFs. In fact, they were one of the first to bring in GIFs. Like I said, another first for Twitter. And you can use videos and upload native videos to Twitter.The other thing that you can also do is you can stream live from Twitter and straight into the platform. The other cool feature that it has on the app on your phone is that there's a recording element where you can record yourself making a video and you can almost edit that video by chopping bits out or changing the order of certain things. So Twitter from a media point of view is great. It really is an all-rounder, like Facebook, where you can really use lots of different ways in which to promote your content.Also, I know that one of the downsides of Twitter is that it moved so fast. There was so much content on there that your post would barely be shown for minutes before it disappeared into the timeline. And therefore, it was a really crowded place to be. Now recently, Twitter have changed their rules around posting and you can no longer post the same post with the same image multiple times, which you could do previously. And I think what this has done for Twitter is it's cleaned up a bit. And it's also given a little bit of air to breathe so that all those bots and spammers that were out there literally chucking out the same content every five seconds, so it felt, are now no longer on there. And therefore, you are able to be heard a little bit more. Reason #3: Twitter is a trend-setter Reason three is that Twitter is often at the forefront of any breaking news. It trends new stories and things get put out on Twitter before they get seen pretty much anywhere else. And they still have this today. Even though the other social media platforms have grown, it still appears that Twitter has this kind of hold on the news and its world when something big goes on. Which means they are still really powerful when it comes to trending hashtags. So obviously, just in case you aren't sure about hashtags and what they mean,...