10 Twitter Tips for Startups and Challenger Brands

With over 190 million users tweeting 65 million times a day, Twitter presents emerging brands with a ton of great opportunities for word of mouth marketing, networking, and brand-building.

Here are 10 tips for startups and challenger brands who are just starting out on Twitter:

1. Claim @YourBrandName ASAP! First things first—make sure you claim your brand name as your Twitter handle, even if you don’t intend to start using Twitter immediately. It seems simple enough to do, but many new or upcoming brands that put it off too long run the risk of being name-squatted. Even big, leading brands have fallen prey to Twitter squatters. Has your desired Twitter handle already been claimed? Spend some time thinking of a good alternative that fits as closely as possible. Make sure it’s not a total departure from your actual brand name, to avoid confusion and loss of brand identity.
2. Take full advantage of Twitter’s design and profile settings. Even though Twitter’s built-in design and profile settings are pretty basic, a surprising number of companies don’t take the time to customize or even complete them. Lesser-known brands who are trying to establish themselves on Twitter should make every effort to brand their profile design by customizing the background image and color settings. Here are 50 great examples of corporate Twitter branding for ideas. This is your chance to really get creative with how you want to be perceived.
3. Don’t over-invest in Twitter tools. You don’t have to invest a lot of money in state-of-the-art Twitter tools in order to be successful. There are tons of great, free or low-cost Twitter tools out there to accomplish practically any Twitter-related task. Large, well-established brands typically have a different set of goals and challenges for using Twitter versus that of a lesser-known brand who is just starting out, and they often invest in robust social media monitoring and tracking tools, and expensive account management platforms without a real need for doing so.
4. Make your brand stand out. Challenger brands must work hard to distinguish themselves from the pack, which is something that can be hard to do with only 140 characters at a time to work with. Finding your brand’s unique voice on Twitter will most likely take time, creativity, and a bit of trial and error. Produce your own original content that promotes your brand while still being engaging and relevant to your followers without being too “salespitchy.”
5. Practice proper care and feeding. Smaller brands typically have much less time and resources to devote to social media compared to large brands, but it’s important for them to develop good “care and feeding” habits in order to use Twitter effectively. If your Twitter isn’t updated on at least a semi-regular basis, your followers will most likely begin to drop off. There are no rules for how often a brand should tweet, but it’s a good idea to set daily or weekly tweet goals to keep the momentum going. And don’t forget to @reply and follow people back on a regular basis, too.
6. Learn from your competitors. Brands can learn a lot simply by looking at what their competitors are doing on Twitter and learning from their examples (and mistakes). Study the ways that leading brands are using Twitter, from the conversations they’re having with their followers to the types of content they’re sharing. What successful things are they doing that you can emulate in your own tweets? What can you do better?
7. Make sure you’ve “got the goods” beyond Twitter, too. Twitter can be an amazing marketing tool for building your brand, but it’s important to remember that it’s just one layer of communication, and there are a lot of other brands out there vying for attention. Make sure your website, blog, and any other online presence are as polished and pitch-perfect as they can be without misleading information or untrustworthy content. And of course, your followers will appreciate openness and honesty in your tweets, too.
8. Cultivate a loyal following. Market segmentation is a good starting point to determine where a challenger brand can have the most impact. On Twitter, brands cultivate a relevant and loyal following by seeking out niche groups of users (using tools like Twitter Lists and Twibes) and engaging with them in a meaningful way. It’s easy to get distracted by statistics like follower counts, but don’t worry so much about the numbers; rather, it’s the quality of the people and connections that really count.
9. Be the people’s champion. On Twitter, Brands have a unique opportunity to connect one-on-one with customers and learn what makes them tick. Twitter is invaluable as a listening tool to understand their interests, motivations and pain points. Use Twitter as your brand’s soapbox to rally support and excitement, address their issues and concerns, (and occasionally swoop in and save the day!).
10. Spice things up. To keep followers interested and engaged, focus on sharing content that is tweet-worthy in some way: things that are cool, interesting, useful, news-worthy, etc. Spice up your tweets with tweet-enhancing tools like Twtapps, Twitpic, hashtags and shortened links. Tweet content is your chance to really set yourself apart.

Now get out there and knock ‘em dead!

4 Comments »

1. Great points to remember, I will be passing this to a couple of my friends who are business newbies on twitter. Thanks!

     Comment by Jenny — March 12, 2011 @ 4:13 am

2. Your list of 10 gets a 10! This is excellent advice!

   Despite I’m working on two new startups (and I’m a hard-core twitterer), I just realized we did not claim @twitternames for those. So, thanks much for the reminder.

   Ky Ekinci
   Co-Founder
   Office Divvy

     Comment by Coworking in Florida — March 12, 2011 @ 10:35 am

3. Very good article. I did not know that Twitter had become that big. They used to be tiny compared to Facebook. Twitter is something that every company should be using.

     Comment by Chuck Bluestein — March 13, 2011 @ 5:52 pm

4. Every business owner should read this weather their established or not. This is basically a great “How to start tweeting” guide for any business that wants to become relevant on twitter.

   Thanks,
   Dave

     Comment by David Mon — April 5, 2011 @ 6:09 pm

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