Often businesses in South Wales report to us that they have not had much success with using Twitter as a marketing tool.
Some businesses will be more successful than others using Twitter, depending on your customer base and how you use the platform.
Twitter needs a lot of time invested in it in order to get a campaign off to a good start. Building followers and engaging other Twitter users does not happen overnight, and therefore any revenue attributed directly to Twitter will take even longer.
However, for many businesses they find that Twitter is well worth the time and effort, as it a great way to engage with customers, suppliers and partners and is also a good way for keeping on top of industry news and information.
A good Twitter campaign engages followers and is very interactive with other Twitter users. If you use Twitter to simply broadcast your own messages you will not get very far. To do well with Twitter it is important to interact and to respond to interactions.
You may find that your industry has a certain hash tag and there may be an hour a week when lots of key players in your industry discuss a certain topic on Twitter using a hash tag that identifies the Tweets as part of the conversation. Taking part in these is a great way to get to know other businesses and to build your brand authority within the industry.
Twitter can also be useful for driving visitors to your website as you publish new articles, or have new products or offers. Through Google Analytics you can see how many website visitors you have had through Twitter, so you can do plenty of A/B testing to find out what time of day to send tweets and what type of language works the best.
Tweets only have a very short half life, so if you have an important message for your followers it is important to send it out often. If you only send it once many of your followers may miss it. Better still, you can direct your tweet to some of your more influential followers in order to gain more coverage.
It is not enough just to be on Twitter. To make the most of it you have to be active, engaged and interesting. You should not measure Twitter just on direct sales, but also as a brand building tool and as a tool for keeping up-to-date with the very latest that is happening within your industry.