Clearview National May 2015 - Issue 162 | Page 94

SOCIALMEDIA In the third of the series on Social Media for Clearview, Sarah Ball, Communication Director at Balls2 Marketing talks Twitter Twitter, hashtags and handles With hashtags and handles, tweets and retweets, Twitter can all sound a bit alien. But it’s the favourite way for a lot of businesses to keep in touch with customers and prospects because it’s so easily accessible on your phone. »»If you’re not convinced try What to post How often out a personal account to talk about the things you like and see what information is out there. If you’re into F1, Foo Fighters or Fast and Furious there’s loads of stuff you can find. Set up a personal profile and just play. Then, when you set it up for your business you’ll know the sort of things that work well. Your first few posts should give a good reflection of your business. Photos of products, people and premises all show something unique about you. If you pay for SEO then using the same words will help this, especially if the tweets link back to webpages or blogs on your site. You can post twitter only offers so that someone has to give you a code to qualify for a discount or freebie.You can also retweet interesting, funny or important tweets or answer other people’s posts. Aim for three to six times a day. A lot of what you’ll say can be repeated because the shelf life of a tweet is only 7 minutes. I think it’s good to have a balance between scheduled posts and live ones. This means you will always have posts going out. Join industry Tweeters There’s already a lot of activity from the window industry. All the major manufacturers have accounts and of course you can follow PIGS if you want to find out where in the UK the latest industry networking is going. Solidor has a door of the month wher e fitters can send in photos of their door installations and win a prize.You can follow @clearviewmag too. 94 » M AY 2015 » CL EARVI E W- UK . C O M What not to post Don’t post anything that could cause offence. Keep it polite, keep it relevant and if you wouldn’t say it to a person’s face then definitely don’t say it on Twitter. Lots of people are worried about what to do if someone is unhappy with you. But if you’re not on Social Media you won’t know and they can say what they like unanswered. So if someone makes a complaint take it off line as quickly as possible, deal with it, and then when it’s resolved tweet about the results. It shows you take your customer service seriously. ‘get local followers and reach more people’ Go local Twitter might be a worldwide phenomenon but it’s really easy to stay local. Most towns and cities have a dedicated hour a week for businesses to tweet. They’re normally really friendly and you can just get stuck into a conversation with someone. It’s a good way to get local followers and reach more people. Finding your local audience will give you better reach in your area which can be good for sales, recommendations and recruitment. Next month Sarah will be talking about how to make the most from LinkedIn. Find Sarah on Twitter @sarah2ball and @balls2marketing