1. Make sure you register your brand name ASAP! – with the popularity of Twitter
increasing at a phenomenal rate, it’s vital to claim your ID before someone else gets it first.
2. Write a biography – think carefully about what you want to write in the biography section;
this is your opportunity to sell yourself.
3. Add your logo and design a background – creating a customer Twitter background and
featuring your branding and logo will help to strengthen your online identity and
encourage recognition in the busy Twitter ‘market place’.
4. Use hash tags in your tweets – users can track tagged keywords (eg #iPad), so if you use
a relevant tag that is trending you will increase the likelihood of people coming across
your content .
5. Encourage ‘retweeting’– getting your followers to retweet your posts is a great way to
spread your influence. Keep your tweets short and engaging to maximise retweet potential
and don’t be afraid to ask followers to retweet a post.
6. Engage – rather than using Twitter solely as a broadcast tool, don’t be afraid to engage
with followers. Use @replies to respond publicly (this will notify the original poster of
your response and thread it so other users can follow the conversation), or direct
messaging to respond to something privately, for example if you receive a complaint
or query about a specific order.
7. Get ready for customer service enquiries – it’s highly likely you will be contacted via
Twitter with customer service questions. These shouldn’t be ignored. Be prepared for your
reader to tell you how best to deal with them.
8. Special offers work – Dell generated $6.5m of revenue on Twitter alone by using offers!
We all love a discount and what better way to spread the news of your offer than on
a social network.
9. Be generous – retweet or comment on tweets by other people and show them you’re not
just interested in what your brand has to say.
10. Monitor – make sure you monitor what tweeters are saying about your brand or your
industry so you can pick up the positives and negatives and handle them effectively.
Twitter search or Tweetbeep are great applications for this.
And a word of caution…
Be aware of Twitter ‘follow bots’ – some companies use bots to automatically follow users
(sometimes randomly, sometimes targeted to demographic data or use of key words) in the
hope that users will follow them back. This may have some small value in increasing your base
of followers, but is seen as annoying and intrusive by most users and may earn you a poor
reputation.