Twitter is a huge social media platform. Once you get the hang of posting short and sweet messages on the microblogging platform (140 characters max), it can be both useful and fun. Here are several PR tips to effectively build your brand using Twitter:
• Determine your target audience and then share their content. Let’s hope you know your target audience is. If you don’t, stop everything now. If you don’t know whom you want to reach, you won’t know what type of content to share or whom you should be following.
Once you know your audiences decide what types of information they want. Check out what they share and post. Follow their Twitter pages. Retweet some of their content and/or comment on it. In order to build your brand you have to build relationships.
• Use the best content and go for quality. Post the best content available, sharing what others say and create your own blog posts to share. Make sure the posts are relevant to your group. Post often. The Twitter feed can move fast. But don’t post just to keep posting.
• Build your following. Ultimately, you want to post content daily and actively search accounts to follow on a daily basis. These efforts, along with offering high-quality content, will help to scale your following relatively quickly. And once you get people responding to your posts—retweets, favoriting and commenting—reply to every one of them.
• Choose your words wisely. What you say on the Web is for eternity. Even if you delete something immediately, at least a few people already will have seen what you wrote, and a backlash may ensue. Don’t react to someone jabbing at you. Demonstrate your ability to control your behavior and others will learn to treat you with respect.
• Make it simple and easy. A lot of people think that using big words or talking in circles demonstrates their expertise. It doesn’t. And, even if it did, no one wants to spend five minutes trying to decipher what you say in one sentence.
One of the truly beautiful things about Twitter is that the space for posting is limited. Yes, you can add a link, but if you don’t get your message across in just a few words, people won’t follow the link. Use Twitter to improve all your presentation skills in order to filter out the bilge. Tell your story, tell it powerfully, but don’t lose the audience with too much pomp.
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Ronn Torossian is CEO of 5W. Follow him on Twitter: @rtorossian5wpr
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