6 Quick Tips to Do More with Twitter for Business

When you consider Twitter for business, it's easy to write it off almost as fast as you signed up. There's a lot of noise, too much link dumping, and more trolls than you can fit under the Golden Gate Bridge. It can look like a hot mess after just a few seconds and that's not much of a first impression to serve up for potential business users. However, that problem can also be its potential. Twitter looks noisy because it's open to everyone - aside from the occasional private profile, who you'll never reach anyway - and that's how you can use it to access an audience that very few other social networks offer. Facebook seems to have more privacy measures than the Pentagon, makingLinkedin is professional, yet closed by design unless you pay a premium. Instagram is more open, but its visual-first approach makes professional conversations a challenge. This leaves Twitter as the most viable open network, potentially giving you direct access to individuals or organizations that fit your target market. That's not to say it's easy, far from it, but it does make navigating the noise worth a second look to check whether your business can benefit from a renewed focus on Twitter.  

6 Quick Tips to Reboot Your Twitter for Business

Try applying the following six steps to get over Twitter's initial hurdles and dig out more leads for your business:

• 1. Research hashtags: Investigate hashtags that relate to your business, especially those that others are monitoring or, better still, regularly tweeting into. Customize your tweets to fit the hashtag's content and try to build conversations around the issues, rather than your business or product. Remember that others are searching these tags, so the more popular the hashtag, the more eyeballs your tweet will reach… just keep it relevant!

• 2. Spread out tweets (and try  repeats!) It’s perfectly acceptable to share your main tweets multiple times during the day. Twitter users are online at varied time and tweets fly through thte stream, so there's very little chance that the same person will come across the same posts often enough to get annoyed. That said, try to adjust phrasing and how you deliver tweets to keep some variety and to test what works best.

• 3. Try to help out: Set up search alerts for questions that relate to your areas of expertise. Answer as many as you can and, even if you don't get there first, try to add some color to the answers that others give. Contribute to the conversation around genuine customer queries and you'll unearth invaluable connections

• 4. Retweet regularly: Sharing what businesses in your target market post adds variety to your information stream and builds goodwill that gives those people reason to reach out to you (or at least be receptive to you reaching out to them.) If you want to wait to show appreciation without sharing at that point, use the favorite function (the star icon on a tweet) or add them to a list of experts in their industry that you can keep track of.

• 5. Watch your @s: Using a profile's Twitter handle - i.e. the name or phrase that follows their @ - feels more personal than a general tweet. Used in a targeted way and individually - that means not in mass @ tag campaigns - it can get you the attention of someone you know is a good prospect in the longer term. It’s all too easy to go over the spam line, however, so be sure you know the person you’re tweeting or have a firm reason to interact with them beyond a basic sales pitch.

• 6. Partipate in Twitter chats and communities: Find the tweet streams in which your potential customers come together (once again, here's where hashtags can be helpful) and start to get involved. If the crowd that assembles in one placefits your target audience, you can start to share your content and insight with these promising online communities.

The open nature of Twitter is a big opportunity for business conversations, but it obviously takes time to build the right relationships. Diving into a sales pitch on the second or third interaction will get you about as much as it would in a real-world situation: a frustrated stare and the cold shoulder in future. A steady, measured development will see your audience start to respond and share the relevant content you post with their audience. That said, in some circumstances your Twitter business profile can set off like a rocket when a well-timed tweet or insightful chat exchange catch the attention of  . Does this change your mind to give Twitter for business another chance? Let us know (and follow!) on the @Ring_Boost handle!