Using Twitter for Business the Tools you need Web2.0

Using Twitter for Business the Tools you need Web2.0

The essential tools for Twitter for Business

Here is where twitter for business really opens your eyes. Use a combination of these tools below and you Will start leveraging the power of twitter to gain important insight into your company and products or services:

Tweetdeck – Tweetdeck can operate a bit like your desktop dashboard to help you set-up searches for key terms and respond directly. It also lets you monitor more updates and a much more visible interface than the twitter homepage

HootSuite – Hootsuite does a number of things, but for support one of the biggest tools is the ability to manage multiple accounts so you can easily jump back and forth from your personal account to the brand support account.

Splitweet - Splitweet, Another pretty cool multiple twitter account manager that also allows you to monitor your brand mentions and has a mac desktop client.

CoTweet – CoTweet is built for the company or brand that wants to both serve and engage new prospects. Used by organizations that needs to have multiple people responding on the same account. But for now in private beta, so you’ll have to request invite. Some big companies are using the beta version such as Ford, Starbucks and Pepsi amongst others Yammer and

GroupTweet – These two aren’t really customer service tools per set, but that both have the nice function of allowing you send a tweet to a group of people you designate, so they are nice company twitter tools and could certainly be employed as a way to send information to an entire customer community. Alright these are the tools there are new ones creeping up all the time so keep an eye out for them. So we can have a way of searching for relevant tweets on your company and product but also a way of managing those relationships using the above tools. These are all free by the way so you really need to be thinking of using these twitter tools in your business. It’s worth maybe getting a social media support team that looks after your companies needs and get them trained in all these applications. Now we need to start using Twitter and get some messages out there so people can start taking notice. Remember you have only 140 characters or less to say something worthwhile.

Looking at how you want to use twitter will define what you tweet about. You can start conversations of about topics to get a feel for a market you can also throw in a product or service of yours and start some feedback for market research purposes and get a sense check of how your company or services are perceived in the real world.

For me twitter is outstanding for intelligence of this kind.

Some other ways to use twitter for business:

Have your employees of your company twitter about good content for moral and newsletters or if you are online publishing firm or SEO firm looking for great content to SEO clients web pages you have instant content creation from as many people as you want. Bookmarking Bookmarking good content and sites for others to look at is a another great way of using twitter a tool called fleckite can create tweets based on a page they have visited and then direct it back to your twitter account Bookmark great content. The possibilities are truly endless you know can have an interaction based bookmark as I call it sparking conversation and thoughts of a topic that you may have for your blog, so instead of just getting a link to go back to you can get the interaction from the visitors there and then saves them posting a comment on your blog!

Here are some more tools to add to your management of twitter for business purposes

WordPress plugins- http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress (if you add the Twitter Facebook application your tweets will automatically show up as status changes on Facebook)

Twitterrific – http://iconfactory.com/software/twitterrific/

Twhirl – http://www.twhirl.org/

Twittermania – http://mashable.com/2008/05/24/14-more-twitter-tools/

Twitterfeed – http://twitterfeed.com/ - this application allows you to feed any RSS feed into a twitter account – use wisely, you can send too much content that turns followers off with this tool. I personally use just one update per day as it just ads some real quality target content on top of my own tweets a nice way to mix up your content and add value.

So we have covered a real load on twitter you should be thinking of different ways to use twitter as a real resource for your business and company profile. How can you use twitter for lead generation?- easy just use the advanced twitter search! Twitter Advanced Search – Advanced search allows you to filter everything that’s being said for your keyword phases in your town, for example. Think that might be useful?

Let’s say you are a tradesman such as plumber who specializes in old boiler systems in rundown apartment blocks in a certain area. If you really took this to the nth level you could find out issues around certain real estate and the complaints that are happening in real time and you can dive straight in there and start offering advice and positioning yourself as a solution. You get the idea the niche and situation is completely bespoke to your market and needs. Advanced searching can give you the keywords, geographic location in distance and dates of the posts etc. Really powerful!

Could you develop some hot leads? – http://search.twitter.com/advanced

The hashtag use Basically the hashtag # can be used to categorize tweets and in this way they can be easily searched using the twitter search facility. It works well for grouped workshops where they have labelled a particular tweet say #workgroup and then everyone can easily tap into these tweets and add or comment as and when they need to. Again implications are diverse a great way for building ad hoc quasi communities in times of need or trouble such as a search and rescue operation. Use the hashtag anyway you want it’s just a labelling and monitoring tool for tweet so the possibilities are endless.

There you have it hopefully now you can see how a free tool like twitter can open up new avenues and cultures within organizations and that can lead to more resourcefulness, less time being lost , and more creativity and productivity in the ways we have looked at above and in previous posts. You can download all this content in a convenient pdf just by signing up for my newsletter where I also look at how you can use facebook , myspace for business as well.