Twitter is real-time connectivity. If you’re following accurate sources, you’ll have immediate access to international, national, and local news. Earn enough potential customers as followers, and you can share your business activities as they’re happening. Build, unbuild, and rebuild your network without the familiarity of Facebook or the formality of LinkedIn.
Stay Up-to-date
When something happens, the first place to report it is the Twittersphere. Twitter on your phone means you can check the news, trends, weather, and emergencies immediately. You can have the answer to the question everyone around you is asking.
The last time you watched a football game on TV and it went to commercial right after an injury, were you wondering what was happening on the field? People are tweeting about it. Has the news quoted a tweet that made you wonder how people responded to it? Login, look it up, and find the thread. Have you seen a strange phrase on a commercial, TV show, or bar napkin and wondered what was the deal with #WhitePeopleProblems? Login, look it up, and get offended.
True, staying up-to-date can be a little bit like information overload. But, being “in the know” can also serve you well at just the right time.
Business Shares
When you capture moments of your own at business functions, team events, or conferences, the best place to put them for real-time consumption is Twitter. iPhones have made it easy with the share options on the pictures you take. To see what you’ve tweeted and who responded, though, you’ll need Twitter on your phone.
Are you attending an exclusive event for which you are a sponsor? Tweet the event, the pictures, and your enthusiasm for the cause you’re supporting. Did you field a team for a charity golf tournament? Tweet pictures, scores, prizes, and selfies from the event to participate in the 4th dimension of marketing.
Your logo and brand is static unless your activities, thought leadership, and handsome mug are all over it. Use Twitter to socialize your company’s activities and you’ll expand your network.
Business Networking
Events have three kinds of constituents: organizers, attendees, and those who missed out. Tweets are for all three. Use the event hashtag to live-tweet your experience including pictures, observations, and notes. Organizers and other attendees will share your activities with likes and re-tweets, exposing you to their entire list of followers. You’ll pick up new followers just by tweeting about being somewhere other people wish they were.
Connect with new opportunities immediately by finding them and following them. Ask people you meet whether they’re on twitter, look them up, and follow them. If, down the road, you decide you don’t want to see their cute puppy pictures in your Twitter feed, you can always unfollow them. But, check their list of “following” and “followers” to see if their network has anyone you’d like to know in it before clicking them into oblivion.
Think of Twitter as a bigger LinkedIn with some Facebook cat-tastrophes thrown in. Twitter is not the place to introduce yourself to a potential customer, but it may be a good place to see what potential customers are reading, liking, re-tweeting, and following. Learn what they want to see and show it to them.
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