How Your Competitor Uses Twitter and Google Buzz

Your competitor uses twitter. You don’t. You think it’s a waste of time and it’s worthless. Here’s how other business uses twitter and the newly launched Google Buzz to their advantage. Use twitter to beat your competitors.

Exposure

Exposure, marketing, awareness, online relationship management. They are all vital to keeping your customers close, keeping your customers happy and being more successful. Twitter and Google Buzz allow your company to have a voice in your extended community. Use this wisely to show your slightly more social, non-corporate side and to really connect with those that buy your products or services.

How to Build Exposure

Sign yourself up to tiwtter under your business name and start. Just start. Start tweeting or just start following. A few initial tips to get you going:

1. Follow your competitors (you might learn something)
2. Follow your partners
3. Follow your sneezers (your active community members)
4. If you need to unfollow, do it slowly, don’t unfollow in bulk
5. Retweet, share the love
6. Contribute to the conversation by stay relatively on topic

Promotions

Companies like Dell and Comcast have done a fantastic job in this area. Offering promotions to your followers helps you reward your loyal customers and to increase exposure.

How to Offer Promotions

You can offer a freebie, a money off voucher or an entry to a draw. Keep it simple, make it work. Follow others doing it to get some tips:

1. TweetMeSavings
2. Guardian Promotions

Support and Sales

Customers need help – they want you to help them. This can be existing customers or new customers. So, provide an access point for them to contact you. If you’re open, upfront and providing support in an open way, your customers and future customers will value you more.

How to Provide Support and Sales

There are many tools out there to help you. Start small, start with a dedicated member of the team to manage the interactions and expand as required. A few to get you started:

1. CoTweet – all in one business twitter solution
2. Topify – Keep on top of it all with email notifications

Marketing

Don’t underestimate the effect of traffic from Twitter and other social networks. Get retweeted by Stephen Fry and Aston Kutcher and you’ll likely crash your servers. Use it to your advantage. Follow advice from the excellent Rae and Lisa and build your brand to enhance your marketing, not at the fault of it.

How to Market Yourself on Google Buzz and Twitter

1. Start slowly and increase your readership
2. If you’re local, use location awareness (those in your vicinity)
3. Share Information, become a knowledgeable resource
4. Use tools like Hootsuite or Twitterfeed to manage interactions

Get In Touch with Us

Want to know more? Get in touch. Email us or leave a comment below to see how we can help your business.