Twitter for Business: What Smart Marketers Are Doing With Twitter

Do you use Twitter to promote your business?

Want to discover how to connect with your audience and engage on Twitter?

To learn how to use Twitter for business, I interview Laura Fitton.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode I interview Laura Fitton, co-author of Twitter for Dummies. She's also founded OneForty (a Twitter app store) and now she is the Inbound Marketing Evangelist at HubSpot.

Laura and I will explore Twitter marketing.

You'll discover how to market yourself on Twitter, develop relationships using the platform and more.

Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below.
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Twitter for Business
How Laura got into Twitter

When Twitter first went big in April 2007, Laura was not immediately on board. Laura admits she even blogged about how stupid she thought Twitter was. The following month she gave it one more shot. Within 24 hours, Laura's opinion changed. She followed a bunch of fascinating people, and saw first-hand how Twitter makes you feel connected.

Laura feels she got the hang of it within a month, went to her first Tweetup and the beginning of June put her Twitter handle on her business cards. She thought Twitter would be big.

In 2008 she reached out to Wiley Publishing because she wanted to write a book that would break down why Twitter was taking off. She never finished that proposal. She did, however, make several friends at Wiley through Twitter. She reached out to one of them and asked who to talk to about her book. They were looking for someone to write Twitter for Dummies. A match was made.

The first edition of Twitter for Dummies came out the same time Laura launched OneForty.

Listen to the show to find out how Laura came up with the name for Pistachio consulting and why she used it for Twitter.

How to be successful on Twitter

Laura hears a lot of the same questions about Twitter all the time: "How do I get more followers?" "What do I tweet about?" "What is the point of Twitter? What is the value for my business?"

Laura believes people need to center everything they do on Twitter around who they want to read it. You need to figure out who the perfect customer is for your business and what they actually need.

Start by writing a Twitter mission statement on your profile that addresses who the account is for and what value it delivers. Whenever you are deciding what to tweet, see if it fits your mission. The other great thing about a mission statement, Laura adds, is that it lets others simply articulate what your account is about, who should follow it and why.

The key to being successful on Twitter is sharing the right information, whether it's your own links or other content. Laura adds that you can get away with a fair amount of self-promotion, if you provide information that helps people, especially the people who would make a good customer for you in the first place.

In his book What Would Google Do?, Jeff Jarvis said, "Do what you do best and link to the rest. You can build a valuable Twitter account that shares hardly any original content if it’s extremely well curated."

Listen to the show to hear Social Media Examiner's Twitter mission statement.

Businesses doing Twitter right

Laura shares two personal Twitter experiences. One with Canada Goose Inc and another with Verizon. In both cases she had a specific customer-service need. With Verizon, she had a wire down on her street. With Canada Goose Inc she had an order for a hard-to-find jacket cancel out.

In both cases she said on Twitter.“Hey @company.