Guideposts For Effective Twitter Use

We’ve had a very active discussion over at Sales Gravy about the effective use of Twitter for business and twitter for sales people.  This just came in from my colleague  Lawrence Berezin over at New York Parking Ticket I think you’ll like his perspective.

Here are 5 mistakes I’ve made with Twitter for business:

1. Casting too wide a net. It’s great to follow people with a wide variety of interests, if you are interested in making friends with people in a distant place. If your interest is business, use the available tools to identify your target audience, and tweet them valuable links and info.

2. Tweeting on too many subjects. I suggest picking 2-3 subjects to tweet about, one being your business interest. Twitter isn’t the place to unleash a stream of business only info. People will not respond

3. Not using analytic tools to monitor feedback. I agree completely with Howard. Hootsuite is a terrific tool

4. Not engaging my followers and friends in conversation. It’s like being at a cocktail party and only talking about yourself. You’ll be drinking alone. Make liberal use of re-tweets. Ask questions. Continue a conversation started by someone else without immediately telling your story

5. Not having a focused strategy and the tactics to implement it. You can get lost in a sea of information about a gazillion topics. Identify 5 business targets, learn about what makes the company tick, who are the twitting executives…follow them and engage them in a conversation about THEIR business. RT some of the content they produce, with a brief comment inserted

I’ve learned from my mistakes and experienced some nice success on Twitter; but took my bumps and bruises before I figured out what worked and what didn’t work.

Great tips from Lawrence …. I hope you find them as useful as I did.

About Howard: Howard Olsen is President of High Output Training Systems, a Boutique Sales Training & Sales Consulting firm based in Vancouver Western Canada. As a professional sales trainer, keynote speaker and sales coach & mentor his powerful sales process and positive profit producing messages help thousands of sales people and business professionals look through the eyes of their customers to close more sales without pressure or friction every year. Follow Howard on Twitter @howardolsen or just give him a call at (604) 731-0901 to see if he can help you and your team.