Using Twitter to Publicise Your Business

As a social media platform, Twitter is great for increasing traffic to your web and blog sites and publicising your business online. Considered much more of a fledgling company in comparison to the likes of Facebook and Myspace (though already this is outdated in an ever-changing web driven world), Twitter is at the forefront of communication in the social media arena. Many businesses continue to use Facebook and find that they receive very little positive response in return for their input on such sites.

This is perhaps because of the target demographic of an individual company for example, however, there are also other underlying potential reasons that may lead to such disappointing results.

While Facebook can be of great use in using graphic design and marketing campaigns driven by imagery as opposed to content, unless a user is able to directly benefit from ‘liking’ a Facebook page, it is becoming increasingly unlikely that their attention will be held long enough to produce a result for the company employing the advertising technique.

Twitter, on the other hand, is relevant, fresh, and driven by short, snappy sentences; content that is focused predominantly on wording over images.

With 53% of Twitter’s users being members for less than a year, the social media platform symbolises something youthful in its essence, something that stands as a breath of fresh air for both businesses and consumers alike.

The compact nature of Twitter as a platform for a voice is appealing to a variation of users, and because of this, using Twitter services for your own company allows you to reach a wide demographic, one perhaps much broader in its scope than Facebook, which focuses on delivering offers and immediate rewards to its consumers, through offers and links to instant ‘free’ gain for the user themselves.

A cosmetic company for example, may successfully run a social media campaign through the use of Facebook as it will allow them to gain ‘likes’ through users gaining a money off voucher in return for clicking and following their page.

For companies less driven by instant gratification, and more keen to gain long term followers or at least traffic to their subsequent blog sites, Twitter is much more suitable and indeed effective. If a company’s marketing approach is focused on delivering a punchy ‘headline’ as it were, then Twitter can act as a highly viable outlet, drawing followers in and hooking them with one simple, effectively chosen sentence.

Another bonus for Twitter is that companies are able to ‘follow’ users, as opposed to having to wait for their customers to come to them. At the click of a button they are able to reach a new user, and present their business to them without the user having to monitor and accept their ‘invite’ to do so first.

This is, in itself, a very useful tool for businesses hoping to improve their outreach to consumers as it means that their approach is much more proactive, rather than passive. View our top 10 tips for Twitter in our Resources section.