Should you use Twitter as part of your Marketing Plan? If you’re looking to increase sales, generate leads, or connect with prospects, it should not be a channel to left to just anyone, to post content unrelated to the brand message or image. As part of the marketing message, the team responsible for marketing should handle the account. In the situation where the twitter account supports an existing customers base, answering inquiries on the customer account, issues or customer complaints is the responsibility of the customer service team. Educate, sometimes entertain, engage and support your customers.

When you think about it, this is really simple. You have product and services that you need to educate your customers about. Your customers have questions and inquire that you can address on this platform that would be informative to others. Do not shy away from difficult conversations with them. This goes a long way in building trust in your community, with your followers or fans

Social Media Strategy plan

In essence, Twitter can be your customer service tool, Brand monitoring tool, sales opportunities tool or the Promoter of other corporate social activities and brand messaging (i.e. blogging, Facebook, YouTube, Etc). As a communication and social networking tool, Twitter can connect with customers, prospects, journalists, employees, candidates, investors and marketing partners. Understanding where Twitter fits within the overall mix of online marketing and communications will help with: allocating monitoring and engagement resources, establishing a working social media policy, workflow management, and reporting. You may very well find a number of synergies available through Twitter, such as connecting with journalists and bloggers for PR purposes but also encouraging link usage when citing the company to assist with SEO efforts.

Is this Your Brands or Business Twitter Plan?

A basic twitter plan for a brand/business should look like this

Goals – Define a specific goal: product promotions, increasing website traffic or Sales or customer service
Message – How will you connect to a) current followers, b) prospective customers, c) provide better customer service through this channel
Hashtag – Identify hashtags that easily identifiable or related to your business – e.g.#sme #agribusiness or #Your Industry – Hashtags are tags used to identify a specific topic, trend, business etc by Twitter users or followers.
Keywords – Identifies your business message and often what you use to reach your customers
Schedule – Decide when to schedule your tweets. Start out by scheduling tweets to be released throughout the day. You will soon find the best time to tweet via analytics. see https://analytics.twitter.com
Frequency – How frequently should you post? Tweets per day, we recommend no less than 5
Tone – Examine how others communicate on twitter, especially the more successful marketers and adapt their writing style until you define your own voice.
Tactics – Use a little variety when writing your tweets, for example, ask questions, make observations, share poll results, and quotes. Again, study the masters and see how they do it

Tweet the same content more than once – Twitter power users also know that it’s okay to submit the same post more than once since not all followers will have seen it the first time. And it’s not even necessary to say, “In case you missed it.” Just tweet it.

Remember to reach out and connect with others who retweet you and who have a similar marketing fit. Engagement, bring others into the conversation, add your hashtags. Develop the subject for the week by highlighting the topic encourage others to engage.