Geschreven door: Dorien on January 14th, 2009

Twitter, the new social networking phenomenon, has taken the web world by storm. People seem to be adapting to Twitter much faster than any other social networking platform, mainly because of its ability to get the message across with very little thought and time. Its micro-blogging feature is limited to 140 characters enabling users to share and communicate with each other with a fraction of the effort that goes into blogging. Moreover, it fosters two way communications between the users. Owing to its simplicity and brilliance in connecting users, individuals and businesses are quickly coming in terms with this incredible phenomenon.

At Arena Bloemen, we are constantly on the look out for newer channels for communicating with our customers for we believe that since we are an online business, it is absolutely necessary to engage in a constant communication. We believe Twitter offers tremendous opportunities to connect with our customers. We are recent adapters to twitter and we have managed to attract sufficient interest from other Twitter users which is reflected in the number of followers we have.

Twitter is a great tool for businesses and helps in raising awareness of a brand. Businesses like Zappos and Wholefoods or charities like Dogstrust and initiatives like follow4charity are all on Twitter with the sole objective of forging relationships and to augment their brand presence among their user base. Of course there are plenty of individual Twitter users out there who just tweet for fun.

Since Twitter is a relatively new phenomenon in Netherlands, we thought it would be quite useful to put together a guide with some simple tips and tricks to help new Twitter users adapt to this incredible social networking platform. Of course, Arena Bloemen is not the first one to write an article about this subject. One Google search titled “Twitter Guide” shows more than 280000 results. But as Twitter is yet to catch up on the Dutch Social Marketing scene, we thought it might be worth explaining some of the tricks we have used in increasing Arena Bloemen’s followers list 0 to over 100 in just a few days.

While @ArenaBloemen, @ArenaBlumen and @ArenaFlowers may not have the perfect Twitter profiles, which some argue should be personal (For example, show a picture of a human rather than a bouquet of flowers), it is still possible for a business to create an interesting Twitter profile by engaging in a communication rather than talking only about the business in all of your 140 character ‘updates’. Our updates, for example, besides talking about the latest flower or bouquet arrangements on our flower site, also include interesting news about marketing, the flower industry in general, fairtrade initiatives and many other topical news.

Any business starting with a new Twitter account should begin with finding twitterers subscribing to similar interests through the handy search tool on the bottom of the Twitter page. You could also log on to a few useful Twitter resource websites such as Twitterholic, where a number of Twitter users are listed, from which you sort which ones you would want to follow. Once you have a list of frequent Twitter users (mainly big names, celebrities, marketing gurus etc) on your “follow” list, you could use the @message feature and communicate with these users, by personally messaging them. They probably will not respond to your messages, but other users searching for these individuals will find your message and will start following you.

For a Dutch site it makes sense to start following lots of Dutch Twitterers. This can be done by searching a few popular Dutch keywords on the Twitter search tool. Once you begin following these Twitter users, you will often find that you are pushed into a conversation with these users. Join in and engage in such banter. Other users interacting with your network of followers will find it much easier to find you. And if you carefully check all the @replies the people you follow are sending, you can find new friends as well. Also, tools such as Followfinder will help.

Twitter will undoubtedly become more professional, which will make it harder to find a quick and easy way of finding lots of followers, people will not be inclined anymore to just follow everyone that follows them and good content in updates will (hopefully) become more important. After all, it was never meant as a chatting tool.

Twitter’s popularity has grown so much in the recent days that a number of resources are developed just to aid users, some of which are extremely useful and some are fun to use. For example, to check whether people are still following you, how much influence you have got through Twitter or even a tool to measure the money your Twitter account is worth. Some of the more useful tools are Tweetstats and Twittercounter which help you analyse your activity on Twitter.

Now go and make some new followers and don’t forget to follow us @ArenaBloemen!

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Categorie: Marketing on January 14th, 2009

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