Welcome to the world of Twitter, no longer a social network according to its creators, but rather a social information network where you can tell everyone what you’re up to at any time of the day or night.
If people like what they read, they might pass it on to their followers and those people could start to follow you too. But if the flow of information is strictly one way by only talking at your followers, rather than to and with them, you could be missing out on some of the most valuable opportunities the Twittosphere has to offer.
Lady Gaga doesn’t just blab about herself to her 150,000 loyal tweeters and neither should you. Savvy salon users engage with followers by offering comments about current events important to their audiences, details of recent team successes, links to artistic work done by team members, and celebrity hairstyle comments—peppered with the occasional marketing message like a new color campaign. Suddenly the whole Twitter network becomes a social information network—a true community of like-minded souls.
(Note: Linkup Marketing specializes in online marketing solutions for small business owners. LinkupMarketing.com)
Tweet Examples:
• Commune with your clients
Right: Don’t you just luv that new hue of red @clientuseame is rocking?! (link to pic)
Wrong: Luv her hair, but we need to work on her freckles! Just sayin.
• Establish your expertise:
Right: Make sure your hair is surviving this extra harsh winter! (link to salon/product info)
Wrong: Don’t chance your dry, winter hair to anyone but us; we’re the best!
• Create tweets about your marketing programs:
Right: We can’t wait for our cut-a-thon on Saturday at 1pm. Please retweet and invite your friends!
Wrong: We’re slashing prices for a cause and hoping for lots of publicity.
More Twitter Tips!
Often it’s not how you tweet, but what you tweet that counts.
When it comes to Twitter, Chris Brogan is a veritable well of expert advice. Here, he shares 12 tips to get you headed in the right direction when using Twitter for your career and your salon.
1. Follow anyone who follows you and un-follow spammers and jerks.
2. Promote other people 12 times to every 1 self-promotion tweet.
3. Build lists to watch people who matter to you most.
4. Retweet the good stuff from others; sharing is caring.
5. Retweeting someone’s nice words about you is lame.
6. A lot of @replies shows loads of humanity/engagement.
7. Robot tweets are less sexy than human tweets.
8. Twitter allows up to 140 characters per tweet. Leave 20 charac-ters or more space at the end of each tweet to improve retweeting.
9. Use Twitter as a communication tool and not as another way to do online marketing blasts.
10. The best mobile app is the one that you’re most comfortable using.
11. Tweets that point people to photos, video or music will enhance your postings.
12. When using Twitter, set an egg timer; it’s addictive.
(Note: Chris Brogan consults and speaks professionally with Fortune 100 and 500 companies like PepsiCo, General Motors, Microsoft, and more, on the future of business communications and social software technologies. (ChrisBrogan.com).
Twitter Tools
Use these marketing tools to easily facilitate and track your efforts on Twitter.
• HootSuite (HootSuite.com) allows you to use social web tools to schedule and publish messages to multiple social networks, monitor results and efficiently participate in conversations.
• Twhirl (Twhirl.org) and TweetDeck (TweetDeck.com) can separate direct messages; @Replies, allow you to view a string of tweets from an individual users. You can also tweet within the application itself instead of using your browser.
• Seesmic (Seesmic.com) specializes in monitoring, updating and engaging users in real time.
• Tools like http://bit.ly let you see stats. Use them.
• TweetChat (TweetChat.com) makes following event chats easy—just put in a hashtag and go. (Hashtags help you search for tweets within a specific topic. If you search on americanidol, for instance, you’ll get a list of tweets related to the TV show and not American idols in general. A popular site for hashtag tweets: Hashtags.org).
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