Week 11 Part A: Marketing with Twitter, LinkedIn, Social Influencers

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Business Marketing with Twitter

I signed up for Twitter in 2009. It never appealed to me. I quickly got overwhelmed by the fast-paced  nature of the platform. Unless you could engage often it seemed like a waste of time. If you didn't engage often then it was a waste of time. Catch 22.

After dusting off the username and password to get into my account, I did a little researching and exploring. My researching revealed pros and cons of this platform.

Benefits of Twitter

Frequent and carefully scripted tweets can promote brand awareness and help your business create a larger and more robust online digital presence. Frequent tweeting helps you to control the narrative about your business. If you're not actively speaking for your brand, other people can speak for you. It may not be worth the gamble to leave it to chance. 

Creating a community around your brand helps to you to learn about and finely tune your target market. Having a dedicated following strengthens your brand and can even help promote viral content. You can connect and engage with your target market in a personal and more casual fashion. This conversational marketing gives a personality to your brand and a face and voice to your audience. As people learn more about your culture and read about what your company offers, they develop trust in you.This in turn can potentially convert them into paying customers. Unfortunately Twitter is not known for its high conversion rate, and as such is more valuable for cultivating brand awareness than for sales. 

Because of the face-paced real-time nature of the communication, you can get valuable feedback on your products and services. You can respond to feedback, good and bad, quickly. It is the ultimate in keeping your business agile.

Lastly, I read that having a Twitter presence is a good tool for SEO. Unlike Facebook and Instagram, tweets show up in Google searches.

Negatives of Twitter

It's easy to get overwhelmed. It takes a lot of time, patience, and effort to gain followers. Because of the huge number of Tweets every second, it's hard to get noticed.  If you are a small business and you don't have a staff members tending your Twitter feed, you can feel like you're in Twitter prison, chained to your device. If you have a complaint you must act fast for damage control.

For me, I will be bypassing Twitter until I can get a better handle on the other Social Media platforms. Perhaps I just can't get past my initial dislike for this medium. For my husband's business consulting company, I think the better option is to focus our limited time on LinkedIn because it it better at B2B marketing.

LinkedIn for Business Marketing 

LinkedIn is the platform I like best for our business consulting firm. With over 25 million LinkedIn profiles viewed every day, LinkedIn is an effective platform for Business to Business networking.

Here are some of the features that are helpful for our business.  

  1.  You have opportunities to network with like-minded business professionals every day. You can interact with your community and direct message them via LinkedIn messaging.
  2. You can conduct research and build relationships with people. You can target potential customers with posts that reflect that research.
  3. LinkedIn has a feature that allows others to endorse your skills and write up recommendations, and you can do the same for them. People who are searching for networking connections or job candidates will take these recommendations into consideration. 
  4. You can choose who to connect to. Possibilities are past co-workers, employers, competitors, associated business professionals, etc.  
  5. Join can professional groups. LinkedIn hosts thousands of online groups for networking.
  6. You can see who is viewing your profile and message them if you wish. It helps you to meet new people and make beneficial connections. 

Social Influencers

What do I know of social influencers? I'm an old fart. I roll my eyes at trendy young women and men turning themselves into celebrities by applying makeup on camera. BUT! I realize I can't turn into my grandparents just yet so I did some searches to see if there are actually social influencers in the business consulting world. Google says yes there are!

For those curious here is a link to the top digital marketing influencers of 2021. https://animasmarketing.com/top-digital-marketing-influencers-follow-2021/ 

This list was a little more valuable in terms of regular business consultants who are labeled as "influencers." 

https://klear.com/influencers/Consulting

I searched up a number of the names on the list and indeed these are some big name influencers in the business consulting world. These are savvy business people. But, I have not found the type of influencer that you pay to promote your product or service. No doubt they are there. You can pay fellow authors to rate your book on Amazon, so there must be something like it our there for businesses. Isn't that cheating? I guess when practices become common enough there is acceptance.

Of the three social platforms above and the other, I feel our company is best served with LinkedIn. We will continue to use Facebook, Instagram, and blogs, as well as explore podcasts in the future.

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