How can the company leverage social media - Twitter - to grow its business?

Twitter is well-known micro blogging social media platform, where users can share, interact and build a network using 140 characters or less. Leading businesses and organizations use this social media platform to share news, latest events or product launches to their followers or customers. Companies like, Dell, HP, Microsoft, IBM, Starbucks etc are leader in it. Twitter currently has more than 140 million active users, generating more than 340 millions tweets per day on website.

Reasons, why companies should rely on Twitter to foster its business?

·       Connecting with customers and employees, by this company spread update on current or future activities.

·       Branding, on twitter company can promote brand image of its company through personal account or company logos etc., even organizations can set profile background according to companies brand and industry.

·       Marketing, companies use Twitter platform to market itself by tweets update, latest news about companies, online services to their customers etc.

·       Spy on competition, you can follow your competitor too. And on their tweet updates you can make strategies, or you can check how your competitor is serving their customers.

·       To grow upward in sales and profits, Dell is the company which reported $6.1 million sales through Twitter.

·       Brand loyalty, by regular valuable tweets organizations can increase its brand without any cost on social media platform.  

Effective and progressive methods, tools and applications to grow business on Twitter,

·       Promote your employees and their work story, by this employees feel proud about their company and followers get good impression towards company.

·       Promote company’s blogs or articles, and ask a question or explain what’s next? To keep interest level high.

·       Follow interesting people, if you find someone who tweets interesting, check out who he/she follows.

·       Use direct messaging for one to one conversation, and utilize short URL option to make URL tiny.

·       Communicate to others tweets by reply, and retweeting on others posts. It is a best way to grow community.

·       Use hash tag or #tag, added to your tweet acts as a way to create categories, groups or topics for tweets that can others read as well. This can be use as promoting events or product launches etc.

·       Twellow, twitter phone directory that short people by industry and makes it simple category format. This can be a great way to find people in your industry or company domain.

·       Tweet Facebook application, your tweet will be automatic shown if you change your Facebook status.

·       Use twitter filter to survive from overloaded tweets, this tool automatically filters devalued tweets.

·       Advance search, by this you can find old tweets based on words or phrases or by any hash tags.

·       LinkedIn users can automatically update their tweet status by their LinkedIn status updates.

·       Manage your tweet activities by software called TweetDesk; this can keep an eye on each tweet activities.

 All features and techniques mentions in this research from twitter are free of cost. For this all you need is a professional profile and to maintain professional status on all these social media websites. Cost for particular activities are not too high, you just need a person who is sound enough in finance knowledge and interest in social media activities. Other alternative is to give access of these social media platforms to selected person in a company or a department, like, Heads of Department, senior analysts, equity researchers etc. In this I would prefer not to give access to under matured person or newly hired employee in a company. 

@rutvij_bhutaiya (Twitter)