The power of Twitter to connect businesses with customers is unmatched. With a simple message, anyone can start a conversation with anyone on this fast-growing social network (an estimated 288 million active users in 2013).
Many users use the power of talking peer-to-peer to interact directly with brands and companies. A GlobalWebIndex study shows that a lot of sales, marketing and customer service activity is conducted on Twitter, including gathering information about products, asking questions, giving complaints and compliments, and seeking support. Not to mention the proliferation of tweets that accompanies any business event or conference.
Twitter tools for business
If your business is using Twitter as a communication channel with customers, whether you have one account or multiple, managing these conversations and interactions, as well as your brand’s own tweets and content distribution, is a must.
Here are just a few of the Twitter follower tools available to help you optimize conversations with customers and leads on Twitter:
Twitter for Business: Twitter’s own business site is worth taking a new look at. It’s been redesigned with a focus on B2B, including web marketing tools to integrate and show off tweets across your website and other social networks, advertising and audience targeting, and a rich set of measurement and analytical tools—including links to a variety of tools from Twitter certified partners.
HubSpot ReTweet Lab: This free Twitter analytics tool lets you analyze any account. It compares the user’s current behavior on Twitter with tweets from the same account that are getting more retweets. For example, it examines the effects of what time of day the tweets are sent, length, use of hashtags, and whether a question is asked or call to action included. If you want to tweak your tweeting style, it’s worth trying out.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud: The popular CRM suite integrates listening, publishing, advertising and analytical tools to help you manage Twitter campaigns. It offers lots of dashboards and detailed insights to help businesses make decisions and manage customer relationships and nurture leads. Cloud-based, it’s scaled for small businesses through to large corporations.
Sprinklr Social@Scale: This tool helps organizations listen to and filter out the most important conversations with their brand. It analyzes and scores follower tweets for such attributes as influence, location and engagement, so you can prioritize responses and gain Twitter followers. On the organizational side, it organizes tweets across departments and through the sales cycle, so you can facilitate responses in a consistent brand voice.
