Optimize Your Bio
You want to make sure your company identity and voice are all branded well. This means having a bio that tells your audience who you are and includes a link to the company’s webpage or their landing page. Have a consistent tone between the Twitter account and the landing page, so your audience has a clear understanding of who you are and what you do.
Find Out Influencers and Experts in the Target Areas and Interact With Them Regularly
Use Twitter search or tools such as Topsy to figure out where like-minded prospects, influencers, and customers are by searching for keywords that relate to your industry. Then follow them and interact with them on a daily basis. You should make a list of the top one hundred most prominent businesses and people in your niche – thought leaders, journalists, potential customers, writers and bloggers, potential partners, etc.
Then, add them to your private Twitter list and participate with them on a day-to-day basis. Tools such as Hoot suite will make it easier to manage this process. Remember to be helpful and casual rather than promotional. Build a relationship with these people and look for opportunities where you can collaborate together.
Get Your Colleagues Involved
The first people who are going to help you build your brand are going to come from inside the company. Make sure co-workers are following on Twitter and engaging with posts by tweeting, retweeting, and commenting.
Tweet Regularly
Tweeting on a regular basis is a sign of a healthy, active profile. If you only tweet once a week, or even once a month, you’re not going to keep up with people on Twitter, or even worse, people are going to forget about you. Daily tweets and engagements are a great way to stay in front of your customers. Just be sure you tweet relevant information that’s useful to them. That way, they retweet, comment, or favorite your posts.
Ask for Twitter Love
Ask your followers to retweet, mention, or favorite tweets, or share content with fresh tweets. People like to know they’re helping their favorite brands, so don’t be afraid to ask them for a bit of help getting the word out there.
Track Mentions and Respond
You need to track keywords and brand mentions in order to be sure you know what’s being said. Be sure you respond in a professional, polite manner if it’s appropriate to respond at all. Customer service is the best marketing tool you have, and many customers will post their complaints and product questions on Twitter. You want to be there to show you can help.
Setup your Twitter searches for terms that are relevant to your business. Monitor the conversations in these searches and jump in when it’s appropriate. For example, if you’re a dentist, you can set up a search term for dentist on Twitter in your area, say Philadelphia, so the search term would be ‘dentist Philadelphia.’ Then, when you see that someone has tweeted they need to go to the dentist, but it’s difficult to get an appointment, you can jump in and let them know you have spots open for new patients.
Retweet
You shouldn’t be afraid to retweet because this helps you link with and cement your thought leadership in the industry you’re in. Plus, people love it when their tweets are retweeted by businesses.
Favorite Tweets
There are many people who don’t know how favoriting tweets works, but it gets someone’s attention more than a retweet or a mention.
Follow Hashtags or Trends
You should take a look at trending hashtags and topics and figure out a way to make a relevant connection to your brand. By putting your business in the trending topics, your handle is going to be seen when people search for tweets regarding that specific topic.
Tagging posts with a few trending and relevant hashtags will help you reach new users. However, hashtags need to be used sparingly because people see them as twitter spam when they’re overused or attached to content that’s not relevant.
