80 Ways To Use Twitter As A SMB Owner

It’s pretty common. A small business owner comes to us looking for help promoting his or her business. We suggest using Twitter as a way to find new leads, build relationships and as an overall way to cost effectively market their business. The small business owner then turns around, tilts their head and responds, “Twitter? What can Twitter do for me?”

Well, I’ll tell you. Below are 80 ways a small business owner can use Twitter to build and market their business.

Just like last time, hit print.

Build Credibility

1. Answer common customer questions
2. Share insight and opinion
3. Pass on interesting links/posts
4. Tweet links showing your company featured on other Web sites or mainstream media
5. Tweet often to keep your brand in customer’s top of mind
6. Share high quality content that is relevant to your customers needs
7. Share information about your organization that customers, colleagues and others may be interested to know
8. Promote competitors when they deserve it
9. Tweet links to Slideshare presentations or videos of speaking engagements.
10. Promote upcoming speaking engagements
11. Mention awards you’ve won or accreditations you’ve earned
12. Be the one to break the news in your industry
13. Livetweet events

Market Your Business

1. Talk about company culture and values
2. Let people know the events your company will be attending this year
3. Offer discounts, coupons or special offers to customers who find you via social media
4. Offer discounts on conferences for folks who come to hear you speak
5. Show your human face
6. Talk about what you’re doing
7. Talk about who you are
8. Talk about why you do what you do
9. To get blog subscribers
10. Direct traffic to your site
11. Find referrals
12. Offer referrals
13. Connect vendors to one another
14. Hold contests
15. Highlight employees
16. Publish your Twitter handle on all direct mailings, email newsletters, on your Web site and all other marketing channels. Put it everywhere
17. Promote your latest blog posts and newsletters
18. Share reviews people have left about your site that made you laugh. Or smile
19. Tweet when you do something cool
20. Admit and apologize for flubs to help neutralize the impact
21. Be excited about your week
22. Ask for votes on social media sites (use sparingly)

Grow Ears

1. Track conversations about your brand for online reputation management
2. Track your most important keywords and subscribe to an RSS feed
3. Listen in on conversations about your general industry
4. Do free market research to see what people want/don’t want
5. Conduct Twitter polls to quiz consumer opinion
6. Learn about what’s working/not working for your competitors
7. See how your competitors are interacting with customers
8. Find out who your competitors are talking to and do some competitive intelligence
9. Track conversation patterns for your industry to determine when people are most active online
10. Identify Twitter trends or hot topics related to your industry
11. Find ways to connect what you do with what’s already trending on Twitter
12. Ask people for their opinions. Listen to them
13. Notify customers of any holdups, mishaps or things that may affect business

Grow Your Online Network

1. Connect more personally with contacts from other social networks
2. Use relationship building instead of cold calls and cheesy flyers
3. Use Twellow or Listorious to find people with common interests
4. Fill out your Twellow and We Follow profiles to make it easy for people to find you
5. Use Twitter search to find relevant conversations you can jump into
6. Find guestbloggers for your blog
7. Find guestblogging opportunities for yourself
8. Meet influencers and your ‘industry famous’. Talk to them
9. Mend fences with angry tweeters by following the conversation and offering to help when possible
10. Host weekly Twitter chats to bring your community together and meet new folks
11. Connect your Twitter account to LinkedIn. And to your Facebook account. And to your Web site. And anywhere else you can to make your site more social
12. Participate in Follow Friday to meet new peopleand to encourage others to recommend you, as well
13. Use services like bit.ly to see how people are interacting with your content
14. Discover what actions cause an increase in followers and are important social metrics

Grow Your Offline Network

1. Hold tweetups and introduce your community members in real life
2. Find new customers by using the Advanced Search to track down local conversations
3. Use Twitter Search to track when potential customers mention a competitor…and then reach out to them
4. Offer coupons to encourage community members to make purchases instore
5. Tweet about products just arriving or hot food coming out of the oven
6. Throw a Valentine’s Day party for your Twitter followers
7. Ask Twitter followers to leave testimonials on your site
8. Find new employees

Have Fun

1. Become a better writer
2. Share content that makes you laugh
3. Find content that inspires and motivates you
4. Learn new things, related to your industry or not.
5. Make friendships, not just professional relationships.
6. Create injokes with community members
7. Find new blog topic ideas
8. Get out of your marketing shell and be yourself
9. Use it as your office watercooler if you work from home
10. Make it your own coworking space

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