Thursday 12 November 2015

Why Startups Need Twitter?

Twitter as we know is the world's 2nd largest social network existing. Hordes of enterprises ranging from startups to big established MNCs all around the world have been harnessing the power of 300 million active users.

Yet, many entrepreneurs particularly from developing countries like India are reluctant to jump into the realm of twitter and not making their presence felt. 

I'll give an intermediate twitter guide and will help your firms to harness power of this Social Network.

Why Twitter?

  • Uniqueness - Low cost, useful brand tools and potentially unlimited followers.
  • Free - Need not spend a single buck if you can harness the power organically by sharing relevant and useful content with appropriate #hastags and use it the right way. 
  • Open Interaction - If the hashtags are used in a smart way, anyone searching for some keywords can identify if we had made that word hashtagged. Potentially, it allows us to jump into the conversation even if no one follows them.
  • Reaching Wider Audience - If we take a look at any social media, our reach will be limited with our followers alone. But here, we can share our content to those who follow, and if they find it worthy enough, they will further retweet it to their followers and thus will result in waves of reach throughout the entire twitter sphere.
  • Build Followers -  As I said before, when we reach a wide audience, we will be constantly getting followers and hence we can build our virtual real-time community for our brands.
  • Create a Strong Brand Reputation - As we start building a strong follower base for our brand, it helps in improving the reputation of our brand as it can showcase our products or services to many people at a time and also portray us with great social appeal and tech savvy credentials.
  • Simple - Since it is restricted with just 140 characters, it won't be much complicated like other social networks which requires lots of work to do. It also encourages us to be witty, creative, and most importantly providing a level playing field as we need not invest millions of bucks on advertisements like bigger brands do in other networks.
  • Mobile - Twitter says that about 80% of its monthly active users are mobile users and hence we can connect with them on the go and provide them with continuous and rich experience with our brands.
Strategy for Twitter:
  • Pareto's principle applies here as well. There will always be 20% of consumers who are loyal to our brand and help us in promoting our brand. We should identify them, encourage them, and nurture them through regular engagements. They will in turn retweet and help in reaching our brands far and wide.
  • Influencers - They are the most important people on the network in our field. So we should follow them, retweet their tweets so that in turn they'll do for us. This will give us good publicity and authenticity for our brand. It will thus result in 1000s of followers.
  • Trends - We should always track for recent trends and should jump on it. We should take part in the discussion along with others, and slowly introduce our brand to them. 
  • Think Community - Even though twitter's 300 million followers are reachable, much of the action will happen in informal communities only who use hashtags, talk about brands etc with their own closed network. Trying to connect with such community by putting crucial and important questions with hashtags and wait for the feedback to roll in.
  • Voting - Twitter has introduced voting option for us where we can put up many different ideas or topics to vote and sense the pulse of our consumers or audience.
  • Stay Human - People don't like to engage with those who talk business language. We should talk passionately about our brand, should share our achievements, mistakes and disasters. People love when we talk to them as we would talk to our friends.
  • Engage Your Critics - Critics are the best guides we can get and that too for free. We can learn a lot from them and improve our brands well.
  • Use Images and Videos - Since its just 140 characters, the images and short videos especially gifs help us go beyond and convey our message very effectively. The statistics released by twitter says that pictures were retweeted 35% more and a video 28% more than a simple text tweet. 
  • Timing - Timing is very important and we shoukd make sure that our tweets are posted at peak timings such as at lunch time from 1-3pm, Mondays to Thursdays. Tweets tends to drop at evenings, weekends and friday afternoons. Multiple tweets on a topic can help reach global audience and it can be scheduled using apps like buffer.
Bottom line:
  1. Twitter helps the brand reach far and wide
  2. Can develop good brand identity and reputation.
  3. It helps to showcase our credentials to the world for free 
  4. It provides a level playing field.
  5. Since its mobile, provide us with 24/7 on the go rich experience for consumers
  6. Should connect with influencers and engage with them.
  7. Stay human
  8. Track and tap twitter trends
  9. Increase engagements through pictures and videos.
  10. Tweet at better timings and schedule to reach worldwide audience.

3 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  2. Nice guidelines Sundar. Please be update information, it will help us lot.
    Thank you

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