While running my IT business, I have seen many trends come and go. It’s my business to stay on top of the tools and techniques that can help my clients, and one of the best things I’ve seen happen to small business is the development of social media. It isn’t just the most cost-effective way to market your product, but social media campaigns also often outperform traditional marketing. All the platforms can help, but Twitter is the master tool for engaging your customers and prospects. And Twitter just released a new tool: the Twitter Dashboard, an app that’s designed to make its most helpful features easy to access and convenient to use. This dashboard can help businesses accomplish five important functions:
Improve Efficiency With Custom Feed
The first new, big change with the dashboard is the custom feed. The major difference with a custom feed is that it enables you to see tweets that mention your business by name, rather than just tweets that include your handle. This makes it easier to gauge the big picture and understand how well your engagement generates buzz . It also makes it easier to see how frequently people talk about you and just what they really think.
Schedule Tweets to Stay on Target
If scheduling your tweets doesn’t sound wonderful for a busy business owner, then I don’t know what does. A good schedule can make sure your tweets go out during the best times, improving visibility. It enables you to retain followers by never missing important updates, and, perhaps best of all, any marketing or promotion work you do that involves Twitter won’t miss opportune moments to make sure your most loyal customers and followers are up to date and ready to help promote you.
Inspire You to Make Better Tweets
No matter how well versed you are in Twitter marketing, inspiration tips can still help. The company has put its experts to work to figure out what content works, and they have generated the inspiration feature. It’s intended to jump-start your messages when you get stuck, and it can also help you focus on tweets that followers will find receptive and compelling. Whether you are looking for retweets or generating buzz about your company, inspiration is the starting point.
Analytics Optimize Your Marketing
The tools Twitter used to develop the inspiration tool are at your disposal. The dashboard makes analytics easy to access and understand. You can see the deep details that tell you exactly how your Twitter account is being used and received. You won’t just see which tweets are the most read or shared; you also can see all the subtle changes and their subsequent impact, and you can compare yourself to your peers to learn from their mistakes and successes.
Use Cards to Enrich Your Content
Twitter cards are a feature that let you make your content richer. You can add:
- High-Resolution Photos
- Short Videos
- Gifs
- Charts
- App Downloads
- Audio Files
The cards feature lets you add to your campaigns in ways that can more easily reach different audiences, and you can present information and ideas that don’t translate well through simple text. Cards are one of the easiest ways to separate your presentation from your competitors, and they make it easy to add pleasant surprises to the content you provide to your followers.
According to the people who made it, “Twitter Dashboard is a powerful tool designed to help businesses connect with their customers.” After analyzing it myself, I must agree. This is a resource that every business should be using.