Using Twitter for Business: Build Authority, Drive Traffic, Be Real

Twitter is often misunderstood and little-used by many small businesses, sitting second place to Facebook Pages and often behind LinkedIn as a social media platform. I personally love Twitter for business and only wish I could dedicate more time to it. I enjoy that it’s easy to use, perfect for mobile use, and suits my penchant for, and liking, of spontaneous communications. The tone of Twitter can be less formal and more interactive than it is on other platforms and Twitter can be a KEY tool for building authority for you and your business. When something happens in the news, you’re going to read about it on Twitter before you read about it anywhere else. When something happens in our business, you’re also most likely to hear about it first on Twitter.

Here are four ways the Australian Businesswomen’s Network uses Twitter for business:

1. Twitter for website trafficTwitter is great for linking back to articles and blog posts and directing traffic to your website. In fact it’s one of the top referrers to the Australian Businesswomen’s Network website. To push traffic to your site, post a little snippet (headline-style and compelling) and link back to your site for the full story.
2. Twitter for building authorityTwitter is also great for building authority and establishing a reputation as an expert. For instance, I follow some people’s tweets every day because they’re important to me. They’re my thought leaders, my inspiration. If you send out tweets on a regular basis, you can become a thought leader, too. Because you can search within Twitter for keywords that might be relevant to you, you’re going to come up as an authority if you’re posting a lot of links and good tips and information. When I attend a conference or seminar (and during our own webinars) we tweet highlights and tips as we’re learning them. This adds great value to our followers (who follow us because they have an interest in business) and creates great engagement. It also continues to position us as someone in the business space to follow.
3. Twitter for business communications and being realTwitter is great for wordsmiths, those who have an ability to say things in a quick, powerful way. It is great for short copy; it forces you to have short copy because your posts are limited to 140 characters. It’s fast moving, and it’s the most real-time of all the social media platforms. We grow our Twitter community very quickly when we’re posting relevant content. We keep our content pretty much limited to strictly business; however, as with all social media tools, we do try to also make it friendly and personable, because people like to do business with people. (Personally, I feel we could do a little more of spontaneous tweeting and plan to, moving forward.)
4. Twitter for leveraging existing contentWe also use Twitter to promote our newsletter and blog content by creating tweets about the top stories. We actually schedule some of these tweets to go out over the course of each week so that there’s always a stream of tweets scheduled and in the pipeline. These scheduled tweets make more of the content we’re already creating, keep us contributing regularly and staying active in the Twitter space.

We tweet from @suzidafnis. You can follow us here.