Twitter and building an audience

31st of May 2017 Article by Laura Napper
Twitter and building an audience

Laura Napper, managing director of Twilight Cleaning and Facilities Management, continues her series of exclusive blogs about social media for the ECJ website. Here she offers tips on making the most of using Twitter.

The audience in our industry is immense, it's enormous, but companies are still afraid - it seems almost customary to be quietly watching everyone else. Needless to say - that's not for me.

Some companies that I've had my eye on for a while are retweeting and sharing amongst one another. This is OK, but what about when the groups are insular and don't only have many followers but they don't hashtag either. It's an audience to the selective few. That would be alright if I only wanted a handful of people to see or hear what as a company we want to put out there, so widening that net is valuable to most of us.

Do you know who your audience is? My audience is everyone commercial and the public as we clean public loos as part of our work. I like to put up opinion polls and invite the interaction. Even if it seems a little irrelevant to this industry, I may simply just pick a top ten hash tag and run with it.

An example is this weekend I ran an opinion poll on the #NationalBiscuitDay - not because I have so much care or want to gain from this for this day but because it is light-hearted and not selling, and maybe fun! So, we asked was the Jaffa Cake a) a Cake? or b) a Biscuit? Either way, people engaged and I want to invite the question back into my industry with the VAT question at the end, which is VAT was applicable to biscuits but not cakes, so had to be proven for the benefit of VAT.

I wanted opinions on this in our industry - so, product selling or providing, it's not so very different. Either way, the customer has products from me or through me, like cake or biscuit, it results in the same end - and it gets where it's meant to go.

I usually gain knowing how many people are engaging and like most of the things I do, it's measurable. Whether anyone takes the vote, I can see how many have looked and clicked. Or I can see who watched my live periscope - even if they are not my followers, their business or name come up time and time again.

I like my audience to interact or retweet/ share in some way. The more fun you can inject the more interaction you can expect back, if you haven't tried a gif already, try one, they're such fun too. Local influencers are great for this too, who are yours? Have a think, local influencers may be people near where your business is. They are what I call "good news people".

They are usually positive towards old and new businesses and generally the types who play nicely. Try to suss out on social media who retweets without expecting anything back, they are normally well-connected and not threatened in the slightest by any other company, is this ringing any bells yet?

They are also willing to share and bring out the good - that's the most important trait. We have a few here in Tenterden and Ashford. Our local councillors can be pretty vocal out there - there's one in particular with a phenomenal town website. Or another I like, is the social media company of a local eight-times over business and radio station owner, (many fingers in many pies) who is connected across all industries, does it get better than that? For us, yes!

Tell us how you engage on social media! Email us on laura@twilightcleaning.co.uk or tweet us at @tenterdentwcc!

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