But how do you go about it? sure there are over an estimated 75 million active twitter users and there combined amount of posts run into the billions.
How on earth is one company with one voice going to be able to be seen amongst the deluges of tweets and posts?
There is no clear black or white answer to this, one strategy is to become a thought leader, or an Industry authoritative figure. To do that, you will need to break yourself and your company away from any preconceived ideas you might have in regards to how you traditionally took your brand to the market.
This strategy is the hardest to sell to the business as it involves promoting topics and conversations not necessarily your own.
1. Topic not Product.
Even though you have a product to sell, most people probably don't want to buy it at this moment in time. So if your social media strategy purely involves pushing your product then you will fail. Rather have a decent look at the industry you are in. What new innovations can be found there? What is the latest news? Latest statistics? You know these things, others don't. Find the articles, find the blog posts and retweet them, repost blogs (obviously giving credit to the authors). Share what you stumble across. Become a reference point, someone to watch due to the quality and relevance of your posts.
Fact: More people will follow you for your insights into your industry, than for you pushing your product. Your biggest opportunity to sell will come from questions and interactions you have with your followers.
2. Play follow the leader.
Give credit where credit is due. If someone has an interesting tweet... do them the courtesy of retweeting and then hitting their follow button! not only will they most probably return the favor but the likelihood of them tweeting something else interesting is very high. But be careful, following to many people will create a flood of tweets that will drown out valuable information. The follower sweet spot is around the 150 -200 mark of active content creators and contributors. There is a lot of theory and debate on this, some speculate that the active content contribution rate is 9/100 and content creation is 1/100 but that's definitely a debate for a future post.
Important: turn off outo follow! a lot of programs and bots will randomly add you in the hope that you have auto follow turned on, this will just add to dead weights and sludge followers.
3.Keep it in the ball park
Try sticking to topics that are connected, jumping from disconnected topic to topic will quickly discredit you as a knowledge leader. The last thing you want is to be seen as a virtual ADHD sufferer.
However saying that, If you must cross topics ensure that you have the relevant hash (#) tags. please see point 4 below.
4. Mention it or Hash it
Aah the wonderful world of #hashtags and RT @someones. At first I found it confusing, geeky, and perceived it as industry babble. At first I shied away from using it. After reading this excellent article on the Twitter 101 website I realized I was missing out on a key way of driving people to my Tweets and views.By #hashtagging, not only can I ensure that people find my tweets but also reassure them that my tweets are not just random acts of a hyperactive webbrowsing.
Tip: Find/define your topic # tag and stick to it, don't use "#socialmedia" one day and "#social media" the other day. Don't worry when people search for "Social Media" both forms will be picked up
5. Personality vs. Quirkiness
When possible do inject some personality into your tweets, yes this is difficult in a 140 character world but it can be done. The beauty of social media is that there is a real live human being sitting on the other end sharing information. So show your readers your alive. However: don't be to quirky, your aim is to be seen as being knowledgeable, not be seen as the industry clown. Consider the example tweets below, which appeals to you, your business and your industry the most? How will you talk to your followers?Examples:No personality: "Mimecast wins 2 Knowlist awards http://bit.ly/a3HNSY"
Personality: "Over the moon about our Knowlist Awards - Service excellence & Value for ROI http://bit.ly/a3HNSY #mimecast"
Quirky: "Whooohooo!!! We rock legal!!! We won at the Legal Knowlist Awards http://bit.ly/a3HNSY"
6. Determination and Adaptability.
Remember how Sylvester the cat could never quite catch tweetie bird? one admirable thing is he never gave up. If one tact did not work he tried another and another.Note: Determination and the will to adapt your strategy is the biggest key to making it in social media. Be under no illusion, going viral is much harder than it sounds.In Closing
Never forget Twitter is but one small cog in a much larger social media machine. With time and nurturing it can become an invaluable traffic driver for your business and increase not only your share of voice but also your share of conversation.
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