Customer Contact: Listen First, Talk Later
Twitter is a Web-based “micro-blogging” service, a text messaging service where people exchange the same sort of short message you might send from your cell phone, but distributed to a set of friends, not just one friend at a time. Using Twitter you can send short updates to your “followers,” other users who have chosen to receive your messages. And “short” is really short: messages can be no longer than 140 characters, but that is more than enough if your message is well-crafted.
To use Twitter for business, you need to have followers, people who are listening to your short messages (known as “tweets”). You can invite people directly, but there is another method to get followers that relies on listening to them first. This technique is based on the observation that people you follow will get an e-mail that gives them an option to follow you. Many of the people you follow will follow you back.
So an easy way to get started is to follow a lot of other people, but you want to follow people who are interested in what you have to offer. These people are very easy to discover: just look at who is following your competition.
From the page where you enter your tweets, you can search for other people by keywords. For an apparel boutique, you might try: “style,” “fashion,” “boutique,” “shoe,” and “clothing.” Look through the results page to find entries that are either (a) similar businesses to yours or (b) have themes that are complements to yours. For instance, if you are selling surf apparel, you would search for “surf” and “skateboard” to look for other surf apparel retailers and vendors as well as board shops, skate shops, and conversations about skating or surfing.
Once you have a list of hits, click on a user’s name to get the user’s main page. Then look in the right-hand column for “Followers.” Click on that to get the list of followers for that user. Read through the list to find people who are likely to be interested in what you are offering and click “Follow” next to those entries.
After you follow these users, the users will get an e-mail announcing you. If you have set your username, full name, and bio well, many of these users will decide to follow you.
Following a lot of related users has an additional value—you will show up among a lot of users’ followers, where people looking for tweets like yours will see you.
Next comes the hard part—you’ve made an implicit promise to these people to send them interesting tweets, so get to work. Twitter about things your followers will care about, and include short links back to your website (use tinyurl.com to make long urls shorter). And now you’ve made a connection to a new set of potential customers.
One Response to “Customer Contact: Listen First, Talk Later”
[...] Third, after you have made three or four tweets that you like, invite some followers. Followers are the people who are listening to your tweets, so you want as many followers at you can get who are also current or potential customers. There are several ways to invite people, all of them available from the “Find People” tab at the top of the home page. To get your first set of followers, you can invite friends via e-mail or import addresses from your e-mail account or social networking account. But there is a third way to build a set of followers that involves following other people who may be interested in your tweet because you are interested in theirs. This process is a bit more involved, so it is described in a separate article. [...]
