Social media can be overwhelming, time consuming, and frustrating to manage if you have several accounts. If you just chose one place to start from and really focus on, I’d say Twitter is your best bet. This advice does come with a caveat, and that is, if your target audience isn’t on Twitter, than naturally Twitter isn’t where you should be. But let’s assume they are. Let’s say you have a marketing plan with a specific group in mind and you’ve identified that they do have a significant online and social media presence. Then, Twitter is the perfect place.
Why?
Twitter is a great place to spend time just searching and finding people, companies, or brands to follow. You can see what other companies in your industry are saying, who might make a good partner, what your competition is up to, and what new or relevant things are happening in your industry.
It’s also a good idea to see what types of things your target market is following. You may find a trend you weren’t expecting, or see that most of them follow industry leaders for updates. These help you figure out what information they’d be most interested in when you’re tweeting, and what they are most likely to retweet or interact with. It can even help with ideas for blog topics or case studies!
How?
Twitter gives you the ability to sort your followers with lists. Lists can be public or private and are a great way to separate who’s a potential employee, who’s an expert in your industry, and who you’re trying to target with your marketing.
Some great tools that help with searching for people are Listorious, Twellow, and wefollow. If you have a specific geographic location you are searching for you can also use nearbytweets. These tools help you organize by location, keyword, or hashtag. Tools like HootSuite are great for scheduling tweets and also allow you to create real-time feeds with tweets specifically from your Twitter lists. This helps you sort the tweets of those you’re following so you don’t have to scroll through one huge lists. For example, if you create lists for your employees, your partners, and industry leaders, you can view three separate feeds of each of these lists.
Twitter gives you better and faster access to information and content that you can share as part of your marketing strategy. It gives your brand or company a personality, a voice, and allows you to stand out as a knowledgeable source on whatever information you decide to share.