Social-media presence is becoming an increasingly important tool for any business. Social media allows businesses to target specific audiences, have greater control of their messaging, and allows direct interaction with customers. Though there are benefits to any social media platform, when it comes to speed and direct customer interaction Twitter is king.
Up until very recently, Twitter gave you 140 characters, which included any characters a picture, gif or video might take up. This caused increasing frustration among both consumers and businesses using Twitter as it significantly cut down the amount of space you could use for your actual message. Luckily, Twitter has seen the error of its ways and made an update that allows you to send out a tweet with exactly 140 characters and include a visual separately. This is a big step in the right direction as it allows companies greater freedom in terms of the amount of information their tweets can convey.
Even before this update, Twitter was a valuable tool for businesses, so let’s go over some of its biggest and most valuable advantages.
Speed
The biggest advantage of Twitter is its real-time capabilities, and when it comes to real-time, no other social-media platform can compare. It is by far the fastest way to introduce news to your consumers and clients. This could include introducing a new product, announcing a merger, or even doing damage control when something goes awry.
Not only that, but you can have real-time updates on the response to your news as followers tweet back or ask questions. For example, Eagle Alpha used Twitter to track customer reactions to the Apple Watch when it was first released last year, keeping them updated on if the responses were negative or positive in real-time.
Customer Service
Twitter is quickly becoming one of the best social media platforms for customer care. Unfortunately, brands aren’t using this to its full advantage. In a social customer care report put out by Rational Interaction earlier this year, it was stated the 67 percent of Twitter users that have used Twitter to contact brands for customer service issues, more than half never received a response.
Using Twitter to instantly help with customer-care issues will have a huge impact on improving not only your brand image but will give you valuable insight on what your customers’ needs and concerns are regarding your product or services. For example, Spotify uses Twitter to keep tabs on server issues and keep customers informed when server’s crash on wait times until the site is back up and running. This kind of customer interaction can have a big positive impact on customer satisfaction.
Information
Finally, Twitter is a great way to keep up with and track new information coming out within your industry. You can search specific hashtags, follow prominent people that work in the industry, and keep up to date on articles written in media outlets that cover your scope of work. Keeping informed about new trends and research can be the difference between a good company and a great company.
Twitter has a lot of benefits that can be important when growing and maintaining a business. This, paired with a well laid out social media plan, can become a huge asset in helping boost your company to the next level and creating a larger customer base. The new Twitter update is a great excuse for experimenting with the social media platform if you haven’t already, or to brush up on your Twitter skills if you have. Since, as they always say, if a picture is worth a thousand words, then a tweet is worth a thousand words and 140 characters.