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Lisa Shepherd

customers or their influencers on Twitter? If not, don’t worry
about it, Twitter will not be a productive marketing tool. If they
are, Twitter can be a great tool—if you use it well.

If you decide to use Twitter in your marketing, start by outlining
your goals. Do you want to use it to promote yourself and your
content to your target audience, or do you want to engage in
conversations with your audience and try to build relationships?
The two are different and require different time commitments.

Tweeting to inform means that you’re tweeting blog posts, press
releases, opinions, newsworthy articles, sales promotions,
industry relevant resources, trade show reports, and the like.
This is all content that may be of genuine interest to your
existing customers and prospects. People follow companies
on Twitter to educate themselves and keep up to date on the
latest industry trends.

The informational Twitter strategy is straightforward—the tricky
part is having the valuable, interesting content to tweet about.
There’s too much traffic on Twitter for meaningless tweets to gain
an audience. Before you blast out a tweet, make sure it contains
content that will reflect positively on you and your brand.

The other approach to Twitter is conversational, in which the
goal is interaction with your audience. This is a more personal
approach that helps humanize your company, which in turn
makes people more interested in re-tweeting you, advocating
your brand, and—most importantly—doing business with you.

This approach requires more time and effort than the “tweet
it and leave it” informative strategy. This method requires
that your Twitter identity is a personal face—because people
would prefer to talk with someone, not something—as well as
a primary account monitor who is constantly online and able
to participate in real time. This exclusively personal approach
works well if you or another individual in the company is

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© 2012 Lisa Shepherd