The Power of Twitter: 3 Business Tips

3 Ways Twitter Can Enhance Your Business

Twitter’s IPO went out at $26.00 a share and closed the day at $44.90, an increase of over 70%. This gave Twitter an end of day market capitalization of $24.5 billion. What does this mean for your participants and marketers? Here are some facts about the power of Twitter.

Twitter had 231.7 million average MAUs, a 39% increase from the three months ended September 30, 2012, per Twitter’s SEC filing.

Twitter had 158.8 billion pageviews in the three months ended September 30, 2013, per Twitter’s SEC filing.

Twitter expects to generate $1.33 billion in worldwide ad revenue in 2014 and earn $308.9 million in mobile ad revenue in 2013.

3 Twitter business tips

The power behind Twitter’s IPO and its continued growth as a social media platform for marketers and participants is outlined in these 3 Twitter business tips.

1. Twitter provides a platform for real time communications. Need the latest news or to get a message out quickly or in an emergency, turn to Twitter.

Twitter has become a primary source for breaking news, often through the lens of real people who happen to be present by chance. The classic example is J.Krum’s photo of the US Airways plane in the Hudson. BUT be careful since research based on tweets from the Boston Marathon Bombing found that only 1 out 5 tweets was true and 3 out of 10 tweets were rumors or fake. Interestingly, according to Twitter’s SEC filing, a 2013 Arbitron Inc. and Edison Research study found that 44% of Americans hear about tweets through media channels other than Twitter almost every day.
Twitter is useful for getting mass messages out quickly. This is useful for businesses whose prospects, customers and others needing this information are on Twitter and know to look there for these alerts. Think gate changes and postponed airline flights. At a minimum, Twitter is a good platform for supplementing other notification options.

2. Twitter offers a powerful distribution network. Twitter enables individuals and businesses to broaden their communications initiatives.

Twitter supports cost effective content distribution. It’s a useful forum for letting followers know about your business.
Twitter enables earned media views. Your content can be shared in its entirety through a link, with a social sharing button, or via a ClickToTweet button. Where possible, create tweets for every point in your content.
Twitter supplies another sales channel. Create a deal-of-the-day Twitter handle to alert your followers to your sales. Of course, you should only do one deal each day to make it special.
Twitter helps you to curate relevant news for your audience. Select the best of the content that’s of interest to your followers.
Twitter allows you to leverage the power of influencers. Reach out to others to share your message on Twitter. It can have more power this way since it’s not you speaking.

3. Twitter enables customer engagement and communications. The social media platform offers another entryway for customer contact.

Twitter provides another entryway for businesses to respond directly to customers. Understand that this isn’t a one size fits all solution. It’s best manned by experienced customer service representatives who understand how the platform works and are able to communicate via 140 characters. This isn’t a skill set that every representative has.
Twitter allows businesses to listen to what prospects and customers are saying about their products, brands and companies. It’s a good way to gather insights into your customers as well as your competitors.

Now that Twitter has become a public company, a different set of expectations are in play. Whether or not it eventually returns value to shareholders, the fact remains that Twitter today can enhance your business’s content marketing efforts cost effectively.

Happy Marketing,
Heidi Cohen

Heidi Cohen is the President of Riverside Marketing Strategies. You can find Heidi on Google+, Facebook and Twitter.

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