“Why would anyone into social media be interested in my company or product?”

Truth is, you’re right. Your company or product probably isn’t that interesting.

Contrary to popular belief, social media users are not waiting anxiously for their favorite brand of dinner rolls or laundry detergent to launch a Twitter feed. As marketers, the problem we face is presenting our advertisements in a way that generates enough interest that our audience will tolerate and even want to see our ads.

This is by no means a new challenge for marketers. In the 1950s, manufacturers of household products struggled to find a way to market their products to stay-at-home women on then-new television. The iconic “soap opera” was born.

The soap opera used a formula where 80 percent of the television broadcast was aimed at entertaining the audience with compelling, an often over sensationalized, stories and just 20 percent aimed at advertising. The entertainment value these broadcasts provided to women who were often confined to their homes for the majority of the day was well received. This formula worked then and works now.

Providing your audience with value is still the most successful strategy in today’s new social media world. So the question instead becomes…

“What value can you provide your customers through social media?”

People become devout followers of a social media presence because they feel the channel provides them value. This value can be in the form of entertainment, exclusive deals, prizes, exclusive content, or as a source of local or industry news. Base your social media efforts on providing your audience these values, and they will in turn engage with your brand.

Like so many others, you’ve decided to create a Twitter account for your business. That’s great – but what do you do now? It’s easy to brush off Twitter as a silly pursuit, but for many businesses, it’s an excellent way to achieve any number of goals, from engaging with customers and building loyalty to making connections with influential organizations. It’s also a great place to connect with local media, to establish yourself as a thoughtful resource, to find new customers… need I go on?

Twitter, however silly it may be to some, is here, and it’s growing in popularity. Follow these steps to cultivating your base of followers, engaging with others and hopefully growing your business’s influence.

6 Steps: How to Get Started on Twitter

1. Brand your page. There’s nothing more telling about a Twitter user than if their profile picture is the default “egg” image and their background includes the iconic Twitter bird. You might as well just have the Fail Whale as your wallpaper. Create a custom profile picture and background that reflect your business. Here are a few examples of pages Pivot has branded for clients: EPOCH Senior Living; TimeView; ComfortZone; Karissa Thacker.
2. Decide what you want your Twitter page to be. Do you want to be a resource, providing timely and relevant information about your industry? Do you want to address customers directly with support, tips and FAQs? Do you want to be fun and quirky? (Hint: combining two or more is worth considering.) Stop and think about the purpose you want your Twitter page to serve.
3. Start following. Identify the key players in your industry and follow them. There are several ways to do this. If you know of a specific individual or company in your industry with an active Twitter page, you can follow them directly. You can also search directly on Twitter for words and phrases related to your industry. Be sure to consider the number and frequency of tweets, as well as the number of followers, before hitting the “Follow” button. Someone with a handful of followers who hasn’t tweeted in a month is probably not worth following.
4. Listen first. Before you start tweeting away to your heart’s content, get a feel for the language of Twitter first. See what topics your influencers are talking about, and decipher the “twitter-speak” they use. See what’s trending, what hashtags (#) users are using, what issues matter to them.
5. Start tweeting, but be wary. Keep in mind that Twitter is like one big party, and you’re the awkward new guy who just walked into the room. Would you walk into a room full of strangers and start talking about yourself to the first person you saw? If so, you probably wouldn’t be very popular. To get others to listen to what you have to say and, hopefully follow you back, show you provide value by sharing timely, relevant information, by re-tweeting other relevant posts (kind of like an “atta-boy” to another user), and by keeping the talk about yourself to a minimum.
6. Keep with it. Unless you’re Chris Brown or Justin Bieber, Twitter takes time to master. Stick with your strategy and be consistent. If you’re just starting out, I’d recommend posting several times a day, if possible.

There are a number of free Twitter tools out there, like Hootsuite, Klout, SocialOomph and many more you can use to schedule your tweets, organizer your followers/following lists, and send automatic messages.

What about you – any tips for aspiring @JustinBieber’s out there?

We like that Twitter is working hard to get folks who dabble-tweet more involved. Recently they shared the potential benefits and strategies for getting the most out of Twitter. The Twitter folks offer the following three suggestions:

1) Follow your interests. People who enjoy Twitter follow a variety of accounts: friends, family, experts in their profession, local shops and events, and most importantly, people who share their passions.

2) Get specific. Love food? Sports? Business? You can follow a mix of celebrities, experts, critics and others who can keep you abreast of the latest.

3) Emergencies. People increasingly turn to Twitter during emergencies. Snowstorms, power outages and fires are good examples. Using a #hashtag really helps filter the clutter. When Boulder County experienced major fires last year, #boulderfire became a go-to for official and unofficial news as it broke.

We offer additional thoughts:

4) Use Twitter to build blog traffic. You can only do so much with Twitter’s 140 characters. When you generate a blog  post, create a separate Tweet and share the blog permalink via Twitter to create inbound links to your blog.

5) Ask questions. Working on a paper, report or presentation and stumped for a good example to illustrate a point? Ask your followers. You’ll be surprised by the insightful responses you’ll get.

What are your ideas for getting the most out of Twitter? What do you think of mine?

Pivot client Stephanie Klein, the President and CEO of the Boomer Group staffing firm in Denver, is making great strides by marketing herself and her company on Twitter (www.twitter.com/boomergroup).

Stephanie’s building a nice following and exchanging ideas with others in the world of staffing and HR – a field that relies heavily on networking and contacts. And she’s doing it without spending hours a week on Twitter. The plan she follows is simple.

Read more »

You know your customers are active on Twitter so you created an account and have even tweeted a few times. Good for you. Now, how do you build a core group of followers who are interested in your tweets and will help you build your business through their Twitter networks and good, old-fashioned word-of-mouth advertising?

Host an event (live or virtual) and publicize it. Create a Twitter hash tag for the event (something like #greatevent that people can include in all of their tweets about the event before, during and afterward). Publicize the event through all the channels you use to communicate with your leads and clients, include the hash tag and ask everyone to use it when they tweet about your event. You can set up a Twitter search for your #greatevent hash tag and watch the tweets roll in. Read more »