Part 2 of 2: 10 Ways to Use Twitter As Your Greatest Community Builder

We’re back! Here the five final ways that you can use Twitter as your greatest community builder. But before we dive in, make sure you’re caught up – go back to read part one of our community builder series.

Okay, now that you’ve read part one, let’s get started with part two.

1. Add Your Best Followers to a List

Now, you can determine what constitutes as “best” and how exclusive you want to be, but perhaps think of adding those who have shown an interest in your company. They will likely feel honored you paid enough attention to them to invite them over. How does “[Insert your company name here]’s MVP List” sound? Has a ring, right?!

Each year, Kimberly Reynolds of Social Media Examiner creates the Social Media Marketing World Attendees Lists – a perfect example of a community builder.

This year she opened the SMMW16 Attendees List. How amazing would it be to reward those who paid for your conference by retweeting and replying to their content? What proactive customer service! You can easily do this if they are all in one tight list.

Separately, how beneficial could it be to revisit last year’s list to tweet your former attendees to ask how they’ve been and if they’ve thought of coming back this year? OK, so if they weren’t too fond of your conference, they might feel a bit annoyed. However, if they loved it, they’d likely feel honored you reached out personally!

Not only will pulling all of your best interactors’ tweets help you open up more dialogue with them, but it will also allow you to discover and even respond to their likes, dislikes, and desires in order to best serve them with your products or services in the future.

2. Information, Conversation, Sales, Fun

We tend to stick to what we’re great at, but sometimes this doesn’t lend to much variety. If you’re a “just the facts, ma’am” gas station owner, you might tend to only post informational tweets. However, you’re also probably missing a huge opportunity to really connect with your audience due to the lack of personality, or “human factor”. If you are a fun-lovin’ fitness coach, but only tweet funny quips about your day-to-day, you’ll likely have some great interaction, but not much respect for your authority in the fitness industry.

You get that too much of a good thing isn’t great, right? That said, think about mixing up the tone and content of your tweets. Send out a mix of tweets, including ones that are conversational, informational, sales-based, and fun!

Conversational

OshKosh B’gosh is an amazing example of how you can mix it up. They vary their tweets between questions, asking for RTs, informing followers of sales or contests and adding in the fun!

OshKosh B’gosh sent this easy-to-answer question to their followers. People love to share about themselves, so this is a great one! Notice that they included a brand #hashtag. Great use of it!

Informational

Informational posts are more traditionally catered to providing a deeper look into one area of the company’s industry or something that would be useful for the brand’s ideal customer. For OshKosh B’gosh, this might come in the way of how fabrics are dyed, who manufactures their product, styling tips, or anything moms and dads would enjoy. Here’s one of my favorites.

Sales-y

Have you heard of the 80/20 Rule?  If not, here it is: 80% or more of your tweets should show information, personality, and fun, and 20% or less should be in-your-face sales.

Although this one doesn’t blatantly say, “Buy me now!”, it is still aimed at sales and counts as part of the 20%. If OshKosh B’gosh only tweeted these types of posts, they likely wouldn’t have much engagement.

Fun

How amazing would it be to see a brand that you love repost your content and tag you? OshKosh B’gosh regularly features their customers via retweets. Not only does this have a profound impact on that customer, but it also shows others how much your brand is loved and potentially encourages them to tweet you with some love!

3. Twitter Polls

Have you participated in one of these? It’s definitely enticing! When scrolling through their Twitter feed, most stop at this eye-catcher and take a few seconds to play along. Polls can be a fantastic community builder by bonding your community with humor (if you create a fun-loving poll) and likeness (if they have the same answers as others). Plus, it might provoke them to come back seeing more polls down the line. Because it only takes a split second to interact, your followers are much more likely to give you some love here. Not to mention, everyone wants to know which answer is winning, and they can only find out if they cast their vote.

When it’s finished, tweet a few separate times about the results and then possibly write a blog post on the topic with your poll as evidence within. Oh, and don’t forget to tweet about your blog post several times, of course!

I just had to vote so I could see what the majority thought…

4. Search for Topics Relevant to Your Audience and Engage

Of course, adding your ideal customers to your Twitter List will help you keep a thumb on the pulse of what is important to your followers, but you can also search around Twitter for great content using Twitter Advanced Search.

Let’s just say that Bic Pens is a bit low in their inspiration for their February social media calendar. Their Social Media Manager might head over to the Twitter Advanced Search using the above link, or just by utilizing the search within Twitter to check out who is chatting about their product. Here’s what it looks like in both search methods.

Twitter Advanced Search Tool in the Account View

Twitter Advanced Search via the Advanced Search Page

From my search, I found this beautiful nugget that @pderricks just tweeted! It’s perfection! He obviously loves the tool, because he took the time to take a great photo and broadcast a tweet to his 2,079 followers.

Once you find a great one of these for your business, take a moment to scan through that follower’s feed to see what they’re interested in. [Tangent: Of course, this is a great opportunity to engage with them on their feed–especially in the post where they mentioned you. You can also RT their content and add them to your Twitter List!]

After scanning through @pderricks feed, I noticed a few things…

1) He’s an author (books, writing, notes, pens – it’s all coming together now),

2) He takes time to reflect and show gratitude for everyday things:

3) He values showing a personal touch on Twitter:

Now, this doesn’t mean I need to change my entire strategy to cater to one follower’s likes and dislikes. It’s simply something to take note of (with a Bic pen, of course) and track to see if you find any trends. You might even be able to add in a couple author-related tweets right away, as this is a large audience, or you can retweet his picture of the Bic pen with a question like this to your audience: 

“Bic Multi-pen or Bic Rollerball? @pderricks loves his multi! Thanks, P. Derrick!”

The overall idea is to keep tabs on those who love you. What else do they like? After researching a bit, Bic Pens might find that a large number of their followers are authors. What a great aspect to know about how to cater to your audience!

5. Quick is Key

If you are a small business, don’t feel like you need to monitor your notifications at all times. You need space to rest and work, so monitoring Twitter 24/7 will likely not serve you well. If you’re going this alone, aim to check your notifications once a day. Listen closely and use the Twitter Advanced Search or a listening tool (like Respond or TweetDeck) so you catch mentions of your company that don’t include an @ symbol.

Here are a few brands who really listen for mentions in their audience:

Kleenex

Not afraid to add a little humor and a lot of care to their tweet, Kleenex is great at tweeting empathetic responses.

Pat Flynn

A rockstar in the entrepreneurial community, Pat Flynn takes the time to not only reply to his followers' tweets, but engage with them by asking follow-on questions.

Chalene Johnson

Fitness mogul, turned entrepreneur maven, Chalene Johnson usually sends quick, but enthusiastic replies to her followers.

That wraps 10 ways to use Twitter as your greatest community builder! (Read the first 5 here.) Bringing your community together and letting them know you truly care about them will reflect selflessness and compassion. That’s what we want to see in the brands we love, right?

Tell Us How You Use Twitter as a community builder

We can’t wait to hear! What will you implement from these 10 tips? Or, if you’ve thought of something I didn't mention, please do share!