Twitter: As Captain Kirk Would Say "Engage"

Did you answer the questions about your business in our last blog post?  That worksheet will help you decide whether you are marketing business to business or business to client. You have a different approach if you have a product to sell,  or a service.  You need to decide if you can reach your audience directly through twitter, or if you need to go to a middle man. As an example is your product such that mommy bloggers would want to talk about them, and your audience is those that listen to mommy bloggers? This is an important way to decide exactly how you are going to engage.

Once you’ve come up with these key aspects of your business, then you can begin to develop an action plan on how best to utilize twitter.  If you are business to business, do you know whether or not the businesses you want to interact with are on twitter? Try doing a search on twitter with keywords to see which users fit those target words or which users are talking about your target words. This will help you learn if you are in the right place to begin with. If you are selling a product or a service searching keywords to find out if people are asking for those services can also be helpful.

Next step, as Captain Kirk would say, “Engage.” It’s not simply about pushing out your message, that would simply be spam on twitter, it’s important to talk to people, and read what they are writing about to understand what they want or need out of twitter. Retweet their blogs and their thoughts, and make sure you have a few of your own. (Blogs and thoughts) it’s not all regurgitation of information, there needs to be a sincere desire to socialize. That is why they are called social networks. You can’t simply place your company on autopilot because you see Twitter among other social networks as a tool, you must actually use it to build relationships by finding other people talking about or needing what you have to offer.