Social Media 101: Twitter
Twitter is popular in the social media world and should be one of the tools used by your dealership. Its importance can be seen in the numbers: 284 million monthly active users, 500 million tweets per day and 184 million mobile monthly users. Additionally, the average user spends around three hours a month on the medium. During this time, people are three times more likely to follow brands than they are on Facebook and almost half of them actually learn about products and services via businesses’ tweets. Invest in this platform and groom your Twitter account, so people will find, view and follow your dealership’s Twitter account.
In order to start and maintain a successful Twitter account, you need to follow these guidelines:
- Connect
- Create
- Chat
- Cultivate
1. Connect: Your dealership needs to connect and become immersed with the Twitter universe. Start by following manufacturers, manufacturer reps, industry portals (CycleTrader.com), online marketplaces (oodle.com), bloggers, journalists, celebrities that publicly support the brand, local and affluent members in the community and loyal customers.
Following is part one; part two is engagement. You must tweet, retweet, share and favorite tweets relevant to your dealership’s mission. Do not overly pitch and promote, but engage in a dialogue with your followers. For example, retweet racing news, events and results. Include the Twitter handle of racers your dealership sponsors in the tweet. The Twitter Handle is a Twitter account’s name, for example @JoesDealership. You provide relevant information and include other followers. This is the kind of dialogue that will promote engagement.
2. Create: Generate tweets and retweets with relevant, professional and fun claims, statements and questions. You have a small window of opportunity to engage viewership, so your tweet should incorporate interesting facts, promotions, sneak peeks, news or simple questions that entice someone to reply or share. You can piggyback off trends and their hashtags in order to capture larger audiences. The bigger the trend, the more eyes will see your tweet. Keep in mind, these trends should be selected carefully. A trend very timely and relatable is #SmallBusinessSaturday. If you have an amazing deal going on, then add this hashtag so a larger audience with a general interest in supporting and buying from small businesses will see your tweet.
Last but not least, memes, videos, Vines, photographs, slide shares and banners should be included in a majority of your tweets, since tweets with images have a five times greater engagement rate than those that don’t.
3. Chat: Twitter is a great platform to have a forum discussion without the actual forum. Pick a popular topic that your customers have a significant interest in learning more about. For example, motorcycle winterization. Create and choose relevant hashtags that you can use to keep the conversations in one place #JoesDealership #WinterizeYourBaby. Find a listening platform, (twchat.com, tweetchat.com), so you can easily monitor the chat. Designate one person to be the moderator. The moderator has the power to enforce guidelines, keep the conversation on track, filter spam and block the unfriendly. Then promote the time this chat will take place, add the handles of who will lead the chat and add any disclaimers in regards to the etiquette of the chat like “Any vulgar language used during the session results in an immediate block” and so on. Please host your chat on time, keep on point and end on time.
4. Cultivate: Check and collect the results from your Twitter account’s analytics. A couple popular Twitter Analytics tools are Analytics.twittter.com, twitonomy.com and tweetchup.com. These free tools will help you determine the demographics of your audience. They will also provide you with insight as to how successful your tweets, retweets and Twitter chats are via engagement and when your followers are actively referencing your account’s handle and hashtags. Via these results, you can learn which elements produce engagement and which need a little more refining and tuning. In order to grow and increase the engagement rate, you will have to learn what works.
By following these guidelines, Twitter can add to this year’s holiday success for your dealership. #BlackFriday #FreeShipDay
Amanda White is an account manager for PowerSports Network.
Website: psnsales.com
