How To Use Twitter

Twitter still gets mixed reviews.

Helen Popkin (MSNBC) famously said that  ‘Twitter…. is the latest evidence of the Paris Hilton’ing of America. Twitter is always on, always looked at, and at a 140 character limit, doesn’t have the capacity to be either deep or meaningful!

It’s one of the fastest-growing phenomena on the Internet said the New York Times,  ‘Twitter is a sucker’s game that only serves the needs of tiny elite’ (Seth Finkelstein, The Guardian UK),  and ‘Twitter is on its way to becoming the next killer app’ (TIME Magazine).

So a lot of people still don’t get Twitter – they can’t see how it can make any difference to anyone at all.

Ask a lot of marketing experts what social media marketing is about and they’ll say it can help with branding. It’s something that every business owner with a Facebook page or a Twitter account says when asked why they spend time tweeting and updating.

They’re right – even if they don’t know it.

But here’s what being on Twitter really means: It won’t give you universal recognition. Your rental won’t get recognised from Bogota to Bangladesh. You won’t get lots of traffic linking through to your personal website (even very experienced web marketers only get about one percent of traffic through Twitter). And it certainly won’t turn your one-man business into a goldmine with your own helicopter pad overnight. What it will do is give you trust – which is what what branding is all about.

Buyers won’t just know who you are, they will trust that you’ll deliver what you’re talking about. They know that if they book with you, they’ll never get less than they paid for.

That trust is built firstly by creating an engaging experience. No amount of connecting is going to help if people don’t like it.

But that trust is built by making others understand that you’re on their side, you know what you’re talking about, that you’re one of them and that you care about giving them what they want.

Traditionally, that’s been done through advertising. On social media it’s done through authenticity.

Create an honest (and full of personality) relationship with your market, show them who you are – show that you care – and you’ll win their trust. That’s the kind of branding help that social media brings you.

When you visit the Twitter website, you’ll see it’s all about staying in touch and brevity.

It’s all about giving people the basics without bogging them down with too much information. Some call it micro-blogging because in 140 characters, or less,  you get to get in touch with your ‘followers’ and tell people what’s going on with your holiday home (or your life).

While a conventional blog is a great tool for attracting readers and potential customers, blog posts can get pushed to the bottom of everyone’s list of things to do.

Twitter isn’t like that. It’s a conundrum. Twitter relies on tiny little posts, yet its cumulative effect can be large even though you only have up to 140 characters to tell people what’s going on in your world.

If you want people to know who you are and to remember the name of your business, you have to keep putting it in front of them. That’s what traditional advertising has always aimed to do

Before you begin using Twitter to brand your company then, you first need to think about what you want that brand to say. First look at related tweeters, and how they sell their property, and decide how you want yours to appear in the market.

Special offers are standard marketing practice and can work on Twitter as well as anywhere else. Reward followers for reading your tweets by giving them exclusive deals that they feel they can’t get anywhere else, and you’ll give them an incentive to keep following. You’ll also give yourself some extra sales.

While discounts can be a very powerful way to drive someone to take immediate action, branding doesn’t demand action. It simply requires the follower to keep following you, reading you and to think about you in a certain way. If you make lots of special offers, your customers will see you simply as someone keen to push your rental. Those special offers start to look like a hard sale, and hard selling doesn’t work on Twitter.

Driving followers to your web site is possible on Twitter as you can include a URL in tweets.

Blog post headlines by themselves look very weak on Twitter. A hard-hitting headline (something like ’20 per cent off Winter Break’) can look desperate when it appears in a tweet. Instead of saying something about your brand they tell the reader that you really want them to be doing something for you: you want them to visit your website and buy from you. That’s the wrong way to go about Twitter—and it’s certainly the wrong way to go about driving followers to a website and blog and encouraging them to become regular readers. Twitter works best by creating interest and curiosity. People read your tweets, become a part of your ‘life’ and want to follow. When they see you’ve written a new blog post, they’ll stop by to read it not just because the content is interesting, but because they’re interested in what you wrote. Curiosity, though, doesn’t come as a result of one tweet. It happens through publishing good tweets regularly.

‘Anyone know the background to Easter fireworks in Greece?’   ‘Thinking of designs for Mediterranean gardens, any ideas?’   ‘Wanting to lay a small vineyard behind our rental farmhouse, how can I start?’ ‘Want to redecorate the kitchen using original farmhouse features...’ and extending to ‘…I’ve just written a post about…..check it out at http.//tinyurl.com/etc etc.’

Maintaining a website or blog takes thought and planning. The posts themselves take time to compose and write, but Twitter is something you can use whenever you feel like it – as long as it’s relevant to your brand or to you (but you are part of the brand, anyway). That ease of use is part of what makes Twitter so accessible, and there’s nothing wrong with continuing to post individual tweets as well as tweet sequences.