#TweetsforTwits: Building Your Brand Through Twitter

What is brand building? 

The establishment and improvement of a brand's identity, including giving the brand a set of values that the consumer wants, recognizes, identifies with, and trusts. Values developed in the process of brand building include psychological, physical, and functional properties that consumers desire and should always identify a property that is unique to that brand.

Why would a business owner use Twitter to build their brand? 

• There are almost a half a billion registered Twitter users, with over 100 million from the USA alone.
• Collectively, twitter users now send over 175 million tweets a day. 
• 69% of users follow others based on recommendations from their friends. 
• Twitter is known to reach users that would not normally know about a business, especially for those with no prior reputation.
• Twitter is easily accessible by mobile devices.  Many market researchers agree that people are much more likely to buy or come by the store that they see on a mobile device, as they are out and about already. 
• Twitter is free, and if done correctly, can build a very successful brand for a business.

Businesses use Twitter for customer service, marketing, and to monitor their reputation. It is also a place where you can assess clients' needs and research social trends. 

It is a place for building and maintaining relationships. If social media was a dinner party, than Twitter is where people would socialize before dinner was served. 

How To Successfully Build A Brand Using Twitter

1. Setting up your profile

• You twitter profile is fully brandable. Upload a picture of yourself (you are not an egg), and preferably a picture that you use on other social media profiles. 
•  Use a custom background color scheme consistent with your brand (check out TwitBacks.com for more). 
• In you bio show your personality, but be professional. 

2. Don’t just be casual, be personal

• Update people about the business, but also use tweets to be personal. 
• DO NOT SPAM- people want to interact with a person, not a robot. 
• Must find a balance for how much you promote your product, but also adding value to your tweets by providing quality information. 
• Create a personality. Let them see the real you. 

3. Spark interactivity: Engage, Engage, Engage!

• Retweet, promote, and comment on other people. Engage in conversation by asking and answering questions. Responding to people who tweet at you really gives them the feeling that they “know” you. 
• Tweet tips and advice to help your target audience with their problems. 
• Post Pictures, tweet quotes, and funny articles. 
• Participate in #FollowFriday and #EcoMonday 
• Link your Twitter to your blog or other social websites rather than directly to business website.
• Hold some type of promotional competition to spark your followers to tweet to you. 
• Ex. Jim Irsay tweets contests, Brandon Phillips with his #BPShawtyGiveaways.
• Ask your followers what they think of an idea, which shows them that the company values them. Some users will even retweet what you say so that it reaches all of their followers. 

4. Be faster than RSS 

• When a news story comes out it takes the RSS feeds time to break the news. During this time is the moment to break the story to your followers. 
•  Find a few blogs in your industry to tweet about or link articles of interest from them.

5. Track your progress

• Intwition tracks what links are, were or will be popular on Twitter 
• Twitterverse is an at-a-glance source for finding out what users are most commonly tweeting today 
• Tweet Clouds tell you what a given Twitter user most commonly tweets. 
• TweetStats provides colorful graphs on month-to-month Twitter use, daily and hourly tweets, people replied to most, interfaces preferred, for individual Twitter users.

Building Your Network

1. Know who you want to network with. Determine who your target audience and niche is. 
2. Use a Twitter directory, such as Twello to find people by categories. Add yourself to directories so people can follow you. 
3. Some people follow everyone and some people don't. That is a personal choice, but use lists to manage your followers and contacts. 
4. Go for quality over quantity. Take time to get to know the people in your netowork. 
5. Don't be intimidated by "Big Names". If you like what they are saying then follow them. 

Zappos Does Branding

Zappos CEO Tony continues to consistently provide a great source of information by successfully implementing the Twitter brand building tools. 

American Red Cross 

Simultaneously managing two Twitter accounts could have dire consequences. Case in point: Instead of Tweeting from her personal account, American Red Cross worker Gloria Huang told the nation's premier humanitarian organization's 400,000 followers that she was about to get twisted. It was eventually taken down, but try and stay clear of tweets like this. 

Other Examples:

As we have all seen, Ms. Career Girl Nicole Crimaldi has done an amazing job at using Twitter to grow her brand. She has two separate twitters that focus in different areas, but successfully manages both of her niches by providing engaging and high quality information. 

Brick Street also shows us how effective Twitter brand building can be. Through Twitter they have been able to promote each of their specialty nights, Beat the Clock, drink specials, and the awesome concerts they have had this year. They also make sure to retweet and give out specialty promotions to their followers. Their constant stream of witty and engaging tweets have been extremely useful in reaching out to the entire campus. 

Questions

1. What kind of brands have you seen on Twitter that you thought have built their brand well or been most effective in capturing your attention?

2. Have any of you used Twitter to participate in a contest that was being promoted by somebody?

3. Has anyone used Twitter to build a brand before?

4. How can we utilize Twitter to assist us with our class project?

 Resources 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBTAHloCboY In depth video on Twitter brand building

www.twitback.com A website that provides twitter backgrounds

www.twello.com or www.twitterlocal.net Websites that will help you navigate who to follow

www.tweetdeck.com or www.hootsuite.com Websites that will help organize your Twitter