Engaging customers through Twitter
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On Twitter you don’t just have to post an update and leave it at that. There are so many ways you can engage customers, and potential customers.
In ‘Social Media talks about your business‘ I covered a few ways you can search for what people are saying about your business, products and industry. Following these comments can help you create tweets based on what people are thinking or asking questions about.
If someone is asking where they can buy items which you sell you can tweet about it, you can even tweet directly to them by adding @their-username at the beginning or end of your tweet. While this tweet will still show up to all your followers it will be sent directly to that person as well, whether they’re following you or not. I do suggest that you do not excessively use this to people who aren’t following you, or do it to people who haven’t asked the specific question. I often get people sending me these type of messages promoting their products when I haven’t mentioned anything remotely similar and it is quite annoying (and others can mark you as spam).
If you sell two products, for example wall calendars and weekly diaries, you may have a search set up for each so you can watch what people are saying about them. If during the week a few people have mentioned wall calendars but many people are talking about weekly diaries then you may tweet more about the weekly diaries that you have in stock. The more people are tweeting about an item, the more interest there is in that product. People may be searching for them and are more likely to retweet you.
One way I have seen a few businesses engage customers via Twitter is by having an open question time. You may find that people ask you questions via Twitter (see below to find out if anyone is talking to you) about your products, availability etc, but this can be taken to the next level easily.
Blizzard (maker of online and offline games like World of Warcraft, Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo) often announce a questions time for their followers. People have an hour where they can post questions with a specific #tag (so Blizzard can track ever question), and the developer picks the most common questions and answers them in a forum (as a lot of the answers have over 140 characters).
A group called GOOD ask a question a day and then blog about it the following day. These range from general questions (What is your favourite comfort food?) to questions about a specific issue.
Has someone asked me a question?
So how do you tell if you’re being asked a question? If a person asks you something and you aren’t following them, it won’t appear on your Twitter home page, or if you are doing something else you may miss it.
You will need to click on the @Mentions tab (under where you post your tweets). This will bring up any tweets from people mentioning you. There may be questions, people commenting on what you have said or people retweeting you (which can appear in the ‘@Mentions’ or ‘Retweets > Your Tweets, retweeted tab’ depending how they do it). But here you will be able to find any questions directed at you. Then you can answer by making a tweet, don’t forget to put @their-username so that they will get your response directly to them.
