Pet Product News Editorial Blog:
Friday, March 5, 2010
Tweet, Tweet, Tweet
By Sherri Collins
Editor, Pet Product News International
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
No, that’s not an impersonation of my grandmother’s canary, but a reference to the ever-growing chirp-o-sphere of Twitter. If you spend any amount of time on the Internet or receive e-mail from other business interests, you know that seemingly everyone wants to you to follow them on Twitter—you probably have a Twitter account yourself (or at least your business does). In the world of social media, short bursts of interesting (loosely defined) content are the current hot ticket.
As noted in Twitter’s blog of February 22 (does Twitter having a blog seem weird to anyone else?), “Folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007. By 2008, that number was 300,000, and by 2009, it had grown to 2.5 million per day. Tweets grew 1,400% last year to 35 million per day. Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day—that's an average of 600 tweets per second.”
Wow, 50 million tweets a day. How can a business break through all that chirping to not only reach its desired audience, but also actually have it listen to and act on what is being said? Nathan Hangen, an Internet marketing strategist and founder of Webrepreneur Media, says in his guest column on SocialMediaExaminer.com that there are ways to turn a random tweet into a potential customer. According to Hangen, the first of these is to “Go local with Twitter Geotargeting.” Using the search function, geotargeting allows you to find tweets in your area. If someone in your neighborhood just tweeted about looking for a new dog bowl, you may have just found a potential customer. Hangen also recommends the service TwitHawk, which automatically finds tweets for you using custom search queries to target potential customers.
The second is to “Join the conversation.” Obviously, you need a Twitter account, preferably something that reflects your businesses’ name. If you just read the tweet regarding a new dog bowl, you could reply with a tweet that touted your selection and/or offered up a discount as a first-time customer. Hangen notes that if you excel at “friending” people who are interested in what you have to offer, you just may garner a new batch of repeat customers.
Next up on Hangen’s list is to “Do something unique.” You could offer discount codes or words to your Twitter followers; have “breed of the day” specials in which all ”fill in the breed here” dogs get a bonus gift for visiting; or announce select sale items during a specific time period. Whatever you choose to do, it could make your Twitter followers/customers feel connected to your business in a very special way.
The last method Hangen recommends is to “Use contests to build even more buzz around new or existing products.” The possibilities are endless, but one example he uses is to enter people into contest whenever they used a given hashtag (Google the #moonfruit contest for an example). Alternatively, your followers could be entered into a contest every time they retweeted a specific message.
Whichever methods you choose, Hangen says the trick to gaining new customers via Twitter is to be there for them. Just having an account isn’t enough, you need to listen and respond to your followers on a regular basis. Once you do, you just might find yourself tweeting all the way to the bank.
« All Editorial Blogs
Give us your opinion on
Tweet, Tweet, Tweet
Industry Professional Site: Comments from non-industry professionals will be removed.