This week we were fortunate enough to listen to a webinar run by Nick Bowditch, Twitter Australia’s SME Brand Specialist.

This particular webinar was about how small businesses can use Twitter to engage customers and grow their business. It was interesting to find out that Australian small business owners were the first to use Twitter to talk to their customers in real time, thus showing the potential of Twitter as a marketing platform.

Nick mentioned a few ways to use Twitter to your advantage. 

Use real-time engagement

This can include offering a special discount code that can only be seen by your twitter followers, announcing a one-off sale period or tweeting about a product that has limited stock. Many businesses have found that sales have increased dramatically because of followers seeing these real-time cues.

Humanise your brand

It is important to be authentic when using any social media platform. For example, we recently shared a picture of our team on Melbourne Cup day. This created a lot of engagement on our social media platforms and we could tell that our customers enjoyed putting some faces to our company.

Create Conversation

You already speak to your customers through your website and blog, but on twitter you can converse with your customers in a different way. You can use Twitter to respond quickly to mentions and tweets that come your way. You can also use it to get feedback on a new product or on your content.

Use Twitter to share your content and get noticed

If you have a blog on your website Twitter is a great platform for you to send a link about your blog to your Twitter fans and use it as a traffic tool. Nick suggests sending out a link to your blog at least three times in one day and try to re-word the sentence every time you send it out so it looks a little different every time. This will increase your chances of your tweet being noticed.

Use hashtags to attach yourself to events like #melbournecup or to other trending topics. This is a another great way for your brand to be noticed and will help drive people to your website.

Its also helpful to check out what other small business owners in your industry are doing successfully and then try to introduce some of these ideas into your own small business.

This article first appeared on the Cashflow Manager Australia blog