How To Use Twitter To Grow Your Business

As female entrepreneur business coaches we get asked,

“Can Twitter really be used to grow your business?”

As a female entrepreneur your time is valuable so it’s a great question. We have found that everything we do needs to be weighed against the amount of time it takes and it’s potential to grow your business.

Let’s face it, as a female entrepreneur we tend to wear many different hats and our time is very precious.

So we need to be sure that the business activities we do are of high value.

For us using Twitter to grow your business has been a great strategy and a high percentage of the traffic that we drive to our blog is coming from Twitter.  So the answer is, “yes,” it’s an excellent tool and well worth the time it takes.

So how do you use twitter to grow your business?

Lets start with a few Twitter basics. Twitter is a social media blogging platform with each “tweet” being limited to 140 characters. It’s a social networking site that has a continuous flow of information, “tweets.”

The first step in using Twitter for business is setting up an account and profile. It’s really easy to set up an account just log into twitter.com and follow the steps. Your profile is important. It’s one of the first things people will see to learn about you. Don’t forget to add a profile picture.

There is nothing that says. “Rookie,” faster then a Twitter account with no profile picture!

Once you have your account set up you can use the Twitter search to find people, topics, products or events that are relevant to you and your business. Use it to help you determine who to follow.  The “tweets” you see will be based on who you follow. When people follow you they will see your “tweets.”

Through your tweets you can actively participate in conversations. This is a social media site, so it’s just like going to a party, you want to be social and develop relationships and not talk “shop,” all the time.

Some great tools that are worth looking into are Hootsuite, TweetDeck, Buffer, and Tweetadder.  I love having Hootsuite and Tweetadder because it makes tweeting much easier and provides some time saving automation.

Some of the things we have automated is, follow backs, thank-you for following me messages, and Unfollowes.    

A great way to drive traffic back to your Blog is to use links and hash tags (#).  The hash tags are a way of grouping a conversation, or interest and making it searchable.

Let me give you an example, lets say you are interested in social media, social media as 2 separate words is not searchable, but add the hash tag and take out the space and it becomes a searchable term. Here is what it would look like, #socialmedia.

Using Twitter for business it’s important to link your tweets back to your Blog posts. Because the tweet is limited to 140 characters most of the time you will shorten your links. My favorite link shortener is Stumble upon, su.pr. Be sure to also have a Twitter button on your Blog.

An example of how we would tweet about this blog post would look like this, “How To Use #Twitter To Grow Your #Business, a shortened link, Please ReTweet.“

“Tweeting” for business has worked well for us. Most female entrepreneur have enjoyed using social media for business so have fun, follow leaders in your industry, join the conversation and you’ll be amazed at how fast you build your list of followers and how much, “tweeting,” can help you to grow your business. Follow us, our twitter handle (name) is @lifewithoutlim2.