Twitter is an awesome tool for any small business to use. It is free and has several practical uses for any entrepreneur or small business owner. In this article I will go over Twitter Marketing, using Twitter to monitor your brand, and using Twitter for customer service.

1) Twitter Marketing: Using Twitter for marketing purposes is probably the most common use for the small business. I recommend using a scheduling tool to automate your Twitter marketing. My two favorite Twitter marketing tools are HootSuite and Timely.is. Each has it’s own use cases. Timely.is is great for super easy tweet scheduling. Just load up Timely and it will automatically schedule the tweets for you. You can select how many tweets go out each day. The best part about Timely is that Timely will fire off your tweet when it determines the maximum reach. Spend 15 minutes at the beginning of the week getting your Timely queue setup and that is all it takes. HootSuite is a more complicated feature reach social media scheduling tool. HootSuite let’s you schedule tweets at any time you want. Yo can also schedule updates for other social networks like Facebook or LinkedIn. The best feature of HootSuite is creating a search “stream” with your Twitter keywords. This lets you track your brand and any relevant topics on Twitter. For those rookies about their Twitter search is an extremely powerful rich part of Twitter. Use Twitter search as much as you can.

2) Twitter for monitoring your brand. Like I mentioned use HootSuite and Twitter search to monitor you brand. If anyone mentions you or your brand you can immediately respond to them and help them out. Twitter provides you with real-time insight into the buzz your brand is receiving. If no one is talking about you on Twitter than no one cares about your brand. Keep your eyes and ears open on Twitter and I promise you will learn something about your brand if you pay attention.

3) Twitter is real-time public customer service. You can answer customers’ questions immediately and publicly. The publicly part is great because all your customers will see the response and may have the same issue. Monitoring and customer service go hand-in-hand. You have to monitor Twitter carefully in order to provide top notch customer service.

The key to Twitter is to engage with your customers. Reach out to people and talk with them. Don’t just blast out marketing messages. Talk like a real person. Avoid marketing speak. Build relationships with real customers and real industry leaders.

Source by Matthew A Smith