15 Ways to Use Twitter for Business

1.  First and foremost, find an application you like that will help you organize your tweets so you don’t miss any opportunities to learn what people are saying about you or your company. This will also help you respond better to people who are reaching out to you direction. Tweetdeck is a great tool and can be used from your phone. Download it from www.tweetdeck.com.

2. Organize instant meetups (tweetups) at meetings and conferences, or in your own backyard. For instance, recently a group of wedding planners who met on Twitter organized a picnic together through Twitter.

3. Use as an opinion poll. Ask questions. Get feedback.

4. Use Twitter as a marketing or public relations channel.Be informative and direct people to good things. A word of caution: too many self-serving, self-promotional tweets can actually damage your reputation. Instead add some personal tweets too, or less promotional updates. Maintain the interesting human side.

5. Break news to other industry professionals following you, such as new awards, conferences coming up, and event that could interest them.

6. Create daily opportunities to learn by following interesting people and reading their links to articles and information.

7. Use if for business development, if your prospects are online.

8. Augment customer service, or if you will, a “Twelp line.” Example: Best Buy has 500 people now searching Twitter for people talking about their products and contacting them through Twitter with advice and information when applicable.

9. Widen your circle when your employees tweet. Note: It’s OK to have more than one twitterer at the company. It’s nice to have a variety.

10. Promote and lead traffic to your blog, but ask a question or explain what’s coming next, instead of just addinga link.

11. Create a dialogue and be supportive of others with retweets, shoutouts and links.

12. Monitor your brand and reputation. One of most important and frequently underutilized objectives for twitter is as a way to monitor your brand and reputation. Anytime anything is being said about your company, products, people, or services you can track it and respond instantly.

13. Listen. Search tools such as search.twitter.com and TweetDeck are easy ways to keep track of what’s being said about your company, products, or even the industry as a whole. Smart companies are tuning in to these micro-conversations to get early warnings of problems and to collect feedback on product issues or ideas.

14. Network with like-minded people. Yes, you may even tweet with your competitors or those in other areas, which don’t affect gaining new prospective clients or customers. For example, surgeons and doctors who only practice in one city may communicate ideas or products with other physicians across the country.

15. Add your Twitter feed to your blog or to other social media profiles. If you have a following at your blog or a lot of connections at Facebook or LinkedIn, you can leverage this audience to increase your followers on Twitter.