Micro-blogging is getting more and more popular in Kenya by the day and consequently its biggest platform on the web, Twitter, is rapidly growing as well. This means there’s a whole new emerging market of tech savvy, blogging experienced users that’s just waiting to be grasped. A great opportunity for your business!
Wait a minute, what is Twitter?
For those unfamiliar with micro blogging and more importantly twitter, let me explain a bit how it works. Twitter is basically a service that allows you to update your status with short messages, of up to 140 characters, just like an SMS text message. What makes it so special is that it also has social elements, allowing users to befriend each other (in twitter this is called “following”). Whenever you’re following somebody on twitter you’ll be able to instantly receive their updates and keep up to date with someone’s status. Furthermore because mobility and fastness are of the utmost importance in micro blogging, twitter allows you to update your status via the web page, Instant Messenger, Mobile phone or various other third party applications.
What makes it Different?
Unlike common blogging platforms, Twitter can be easily used as a self-promotion tool, to pitch your content, services and products with ease. This is done by broadcasting your message, although short, to your followers. Unlike in conventional blogging, your message is broadcasted in “real time” to your reader. It’s this mixture of blogging, RSS and social networking that makes twitter so different and so appealing.
Here’s how to utilize Twitter to increase your bottom line.
- Traffic: Twitter is a great way to direct traffic to your company website, blog and other social media locations such as Facebook and Youtube. This is done by including the link to your blog post or website landing page in your tweets. The traffic from twitter isn’t too shabby either. Most of the visitors are quite targeted, thus have higher chances of ‘sticking around’, reading your posts and even subscribing. Its important to note that the amount of traffic you can receive from twitter is directly proportional to the number of followers you posses, plus their retweets of your posts.
- Awareness and Branding: Just like any other social network, twitter can be used as a powerful tool to build your brand and raise awareness. The thing about twitter branding however is that it’s a lot more personal, probably thanks to it’s Instant Messenger like environment, helping you to thin the line between you and your readers.
- Fast help and feedback: Twitter can be an extremely efficient environment for listening to and collecting honest and live feedback regarding your services and products. It also does a great job of complementing your customer service department by giving you room to offer quick feedback to customer queries.
- Find a new audience: Twitter is an emerging market, that’s beginning to explode on the local web sphere with hundreds of thousands of users, meaning there’s a whole new vast audience, that’s just waiting to get exposed to your business. Follow the first three tips and you will soon attract lots of new followers to your Twitter page.
- Latest News: As I have mentioned before, Social Media as much about listening as it is about talking. Because twitter is so instant and spontaneous you can now find out about the latest industry and scene news in a particular field of activity you’re following, within minutes of the actual event.
- Networking: Twitter is a great way to get to know new and like minded individuals, that share your same passions and area of expertise. Following them truly is a pleasure. In addition, you can see what your competitors are up to, open up to mutual promotional work and build future business relationships.
- It’s Viral: Anything that spreads quickly and easily across a community makes a great social service anytime. Twitter works virally in a word of mouth kind of way. If you twit about something important, your followers will then take the story to their followers and so on.
Great partnerships start with a conversation. info@creative.co.ke