Twitter provides your businesses with a great way of interacting with your customers and fans as it enables you to hear what they are saying about you, answer their questions and solve any problems they are having in real-time. This awesome platform has introduced a new way of using Twitter as a CRM tool that you can’t ignore. Ultimately Twitter allows you to build up customer loyalty!
Managing your Twitter presence effectively will not only increase your following and help you engage with your community but also provides you with the opportunity to turn these followers into customers.
Listed are some tips on how you can use Twitter and Audiense to improve the relationship you have with your potential clients, fans and customers.
Having an active Twitter account means that you are open to answer questions from customers and are therefore able to use Twitter to provide customer service, an opportunity which cannot be missed. Asking a question in 140 characters is a lot quicker and easier than sending you an email or phoning your offices. This can increase sales as if customers have a doubt or a question, they will ask you on Twitter whereas they may not bother with the other two channels.
Make sure you answer customers’ questions with solutions, suggestions or links to your website, user guide, blogs as soon as possible as they will expect an instant response.
Twitter is a good way of having people talk about your brand and products, therefore increasing awareness and potentially customers. On the reverse side of this is the ability for customers to publicly complain about you when things go wrong. This does however mean that you have the opportunity to reply to people who have complaints about your brand.
If you deal with these in a way that solves the problem and brings the user benefits, you can end up with a satisfied customer who will then tweet good things about you and your customer service.
Twitter can be used to make customers aware of any problems you might be having with your services or website. Keeping them informed will help the situation by preventing confusion and a mass of questions being directed at you. Similarly you can also keep them updated on things out of your control that are related to your daily operations, e.g. transport or another website.
Twitter can be used as a way of thanking customers or followers for their contribution to your success. It is an easy way of expressing your gratitude and helping create customer loyalty. You should be monitoring your Twitter presence using a Twitter client of your choice e.g. Hootsuite or Tweetdeck to find individual users praising your products or service and send them a reply saying thank you or retweet their post.
When starting out, it can be beneficial to send a personal welcome message to new followers. This shows them your appreciation and can start to build up a relationship between the two of you. This is particularly useful if you are a small business that provides a personalized service. Audiense makes it really easy to do this as your new followers are clearly shown on your dashboard.
Audiense provides you with an easy way of categorizing and organizing your community in the form of notes and tags. For example if customers have a problem or complaint that will take some time to see to, you could add a tag to their profile to remember to come back to them. You can use notes to write about the problems in detail and also assign tags to users who may be interested in new versions of products that will be ready to release soon.
Another use for notes and tags is to classify users into groups for example customers, bloggers, journalists, etc. which saves you from having to perform a search more than once. This works in a similar way to a Twitter list but there is no limit on the number of users you can add a tag to.
Audiense can be used to view all of your latest interactions and from here you can reply, retweet or favourite tweets. It is important to reply to customers as quickly as possible in order to create customer satisfaction.
There is also a section on the dashboard titled “I influence” which shows all of the people who have recently mentioned or retweeted you. Clicking the blue corner of a user’s profile shows you all of the interaction you have had with that user meaning that you can always look back to see what you have told them in the past. This information is available for any user not just those in the “I influence” section and you can use the calendar to go back to interactions from any time period, e.g. the past year, December 2012 etc.
The Audiense dashboard clearly displays your new followers, handy for sending out welcome messages or following back. Audiense gives you the ability to follow multiple users at once. You can also use the calendar to filter by date, for example if you are away for a few days you can see who followed you while you were away.
Similarly as above, you can also see who follows you who you do not follow back. You can use the search and filter options to see if any of these users are ones who you should be following, such as the important people from your industry and your customers. Remember there are some conversations that you will wish to have in private (e.g. dealing with complaints) but users can only send you a Direct Message (DM) if you are following them.
Although Twitter allows you to import contacts from your email accounts, Audiense gives you the ability to import contacts from a text file. For example if you have gathered a list of customers’ Twitter handles or a list of people who have subscribed to your website you could import them using Audiense to follow, add them to a list, tag or tweet them and ultimately manage the relationship you have with these users in the right way.
Remember if you don’t wish to follow someone but want to be able to easily find them again in the future you can add a tag or note to their profile, which allows you to locate them with one click in the future. Another example of how this feature could be useful is if you have recently hosted an event and will wish to invite the attendees to a future event you can import the users and then create a list or a tag to organize and ultimately store their profiles in your own database.