If you’re a business, the likelihood is you use social media to contact customers, post promotions or just send out a “Happy #Humpday” tweet. Twitter is one of the big names in the social media battlefield, and I’m sure it’s not just me who’d be shocked if I went on a business’s website and couldn’t find a Twitter account to match.

Did you know, every second, on average, around 6,000 tweets are sent on Twitter?

Who wouldn’t want to jump in on that potential reach? In this dog eat dog world, it’s important to maintain a strong online brand image, even if you trade offline. It’s been proven time and time again that social media is one of the most powerful tools for humanizing your brand, driving traffic and mining relevant insights.

So how do you utilise this tool?

Spy on your competitors:

In the good old days, you only knew what your competitors were planning promotion-wise when they actually launched the promotion. You couldn’t see who their customers were, if they got positive or negative feedback or how fast they were to respond to queries. Now, with the wonderful invention of public interactions, you basically have a front seat view of your competitors daily engagements.

To use this to your full advantage, you should:

1. Follow a range of your competitors on Twitter.

2. Monitor their interactions on the accounts so you can see when they are having a good or a bad day, then you can decide whether or not to jump in to steal that sale away. But don’t pitch your product as a direct competitor, empathy is your best friend when dealing with a disgruntled customer. So be cheeky, but not too cheeky.

Find audiences to connect with:

With over 232 million active monthly users on Twitter, you need to make sure you’re interacting with the right audience. You don’t want to be wasting your resources on tweeting teenagers when you’re promoting life insurance!

Lucky for us, Twitter provides users with many means of inputting their personal data, which can easily be utilised. These can be anything from their bio content to use of certain hashtags.

If, for example, you are trying to find customers in the Birmingham area, you would simply go to the “places” option in the Twitter advanced search, and set the radius you’d like to zone in on. This is particularly handy if your business only operates in a certain local area.

Sometimes it can be easy to focus on a particular tweet’s content, but what if that tweet was a one off and that user doesn’t really care about life insurance? A Twitter bio contains much more high value Meta data, where you can source URL’s, location, career, hobbies etc.

With all this information so accessible, it can be easy to proactively interact with your target audience making the likelihood of creating a new sale even higher!

Be the first to say hello:

It can be easy to interact with customers when they’re actively mentioning you in their tweets. In fact, if you’re not engaging with them then you need to reassess your social media strategy! But, if you are on top of your direct mention game, the next step should be reaching out to those who don’t mention you, by proactively tweeting!

Try tweeting people who are talking about related subjects to your brand. Try tweeting to those talking about your competitors products. Even add in some cheer and tweet those people who’ve had a bad day at the office. How impressed do you think those users will be when they tweet about needing a dress for the Christmas party, and your business tweets them back with a range of options of what you think their style is like from their social media presence. The beauty of public social media is being able to dive into a conversation whenever you want to!

Proactively interacting can be great for businesses both big and small, to build both your brand awareness and gain new customers. The most important thing to remember with proactive tweeting is the quality of the interaction means more than the quantity of interactions taking place, if you really engage with your next customer, the rewards will soon become clear.

 

By Elena Lockett, PR at Gnatta.

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