How Do You Use Twitter?
If you are one of my followers on Twitter then you know I am spending a lot of time in my office lately which makes me very accessible to my PC. The reason I am spending the desk time instead of the time out on the golf course with clients is due to me doing what nearly the entire business world is do, making changes to meet market demands.
One of the many things businesses need to do is find new markets, new customers, broaden their reach and also keep it REAL. In order to accomplish this businesses need to market more effectively. Today ‘effectively’ is defined as knowing who they are marketing to.
Gone (thank goodness) are the days for the shotgun effect of blasting out an email , direct mailer, a billboard on an interstate, a full page ad in the newspaper and yes a 140 character promotions with a link to a web-site on Twitter. Those methods really did not work effectively. Not to say they did not work at all, just not as effectively as they NOW need to work.
The old method of gathering up a few hundred thousand contacts and hammering them with mind numbing information to squeeze out the few who maybe interested in your product/services is DEAD. Obviously, businesses are going to have to know who the person they are dealing with better, or as I tell my clients, you need to “Know the color of their eyes”.
Devaluing Twitter
So how do you use the tools that were built yesterday that did an excellent job of marketing to millions? How do you narrow the focus down to your markets that are more than likely the ones who are needing what you have to sale?
Lets take the internet as the prime example of “Shotgun Marketing”. There are a number of applications, platforms or sites that businesses use online..Facebook, MySpace, Second Life, LinkedIn and the list goes on. The one that is a mystery on why it is so popular is Twitter. It is no mystery on how it is being used, but more of a question of why it is being used.
I read everywhere where internet experts are harping on Twitters ability to get a message out to millions, but not many mentioning how Twitter can be used Now to get the message out to the peeps who care about your message. This generates the questions that I titled this blog..How do you use Twitter?.
Paring Twitter Down
Businesses and business people need to keep in mind that things NOW have changed.
Until a tool is created to get the job done better, I am a proponent of making the tools available work as best as they can. That is how I feel about Twitter. When you see how others are using Twitter as a game of “How Many Followers Can I Get” you naturally wonder how can Twitter be used as a business tool? In some ways that questions is still valid. However, it is a tool to getting to your market. You just have to pare it down to be more effective.
There are literally zillions of posts made to Twitter from around the world. On the most part they are made by people, but like everything else out on the internet there is this dark cloak that shadows who is posting these messages. The questions is are these posts really produced by a person or a computer programs to spray out gibberish to humor some warped sense of humor.
Once you turn the volume down on Twitter by using tools like TweetDeck you can see the real people better, but even then you have to weed through those who are “totally” out for themselves. The people you will hear are “Branding Themselves” take up a lot of space on Twitter. However, there are those on Twitter who are out doing what you should be doing..meeting other likeminded people.
The way you tell the difference if a peep is a real person or not is if they ‘Respond” to your @reply..if not, they are more than likely only out to promote themselves or what someone is paying to be on Twitter to promote. So, move on quickly…you can waste a lot of time to produce nothing from them. If they do @reply, and @reply frequently with a DM (direct Message) from time to time, then they are the Tweets you need to follow. This is called. “Building your own community”. Put these people on your “A List”…these will be the people you know you can go to get your message heard and on the most part help you get the message out to others.
This is how I have found using Twitter works for me. There are other ways of getting your message out to Real People who are on the internet. I will be back from time to time to enlighten you on other ways of cutting through the crap out here in la-la-land. Until then, let me know how I can help.
Make sure to read more about other business tools you can use to improve your business in my new book, How to Play Business Golf. Click on the cover of the book below to learn how you can get your copy.
