To the sales team, Twitter can be a friend or a foe depending on how it is used. Too often, salespeople use Twitter to broadcast positive messages about their product or services. This can potentially backfire if people get tired of a barrage of marketing ads, and a better way to utilize Twitter is as a means to gather information about your customers and to talk about your brand. Constant sales tweets turn people off and you will quickly lose followers.
If your reps are tweeting, encourage them to do it the right way. Instead of broadcasting adverts all the time, concentrate on insuring that tweets are entertaining and informative. Forefront in the tweeting strategy should be the target demographic – who are you hoping to talk to, and what would they like to hear about? Merely replicating marketing messages that already on your website or in your ad campaigns is not taking full advantage of the opportunity.
Your potential audience is interested in your brand – focus on photos and news from inside the company, about various employees, or anything else that will bring people into the corporate culture and make them feel part of it or that will convey the enthusiasm that you have for serving customer needs.
One well-known social media analyst, Michael Fauscette from IDC, says “Twitter started as a marketing fad. A lot of companies decided they had to do it before they knew what it was they had to do.” Don’t forget that Tweets can easily turn into negative sentiment – be sure that you are always respectful and do not bad-mouth your competition.
Because Twitter is basically a micro-blogging tool, it’s easy to dash off a Tweet without truly considering its impact. A typical Tweet of 140 characters takes 1 minute to write. That kind of hurried pace can lead to postings that do you (and your company) no favors. Teach your reps to stop, read, and consider what they are saying before pushing “send”.
The battle between Ashton Kutcher and CNN to see who could gather one million followers is legend. Unless you are on their level, make sure that the focus of your Tweets is more on quality than sheer numbers.
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