Five ways to leverage Twitter without tweeting

As everyone’s favorite micro-blogging platform, Twitter’s high rate of adoption by businesses isn’t surprising. Among other reasons, Twitter’s large user base, especially in countries like the US, means it is an effective way to extend your brand’s reach to large groups of people at a low cost, as well as to interact with your past, present and future customers.

Besides Twitter’s core functionality of sharing short updates of text, video, pictures or files with a group of followers, you can also use it in several other strategic ways to build your business – and none of them involve writing even one of the 140 characters contained within a tweet.

1. Monitor Your Reputation:
By saving searches on keywords related to your company’s brand name, you can continuously keep track of your brand’s reputation on Twitter, which will allow you to catch problems early if someone’s unhappy with your product or service.

Saved searches on your brand also allow you to immediately know when someone has had a positive experience with your brand. Catching this sentiment early means you can capitalise on the momentum of the positive experience, which can potentially mean turning that person into a repeat customer or a brand evangelist. You can easily save searches on keywords either within the Twitter interface itself, or via third-party clients like TweetDeck and HootSuite.

2. Mine For Opportunities:
As well as saving searches on your brand name, saved searches on general non-branded words related to your industry are a good way to keep up-to-date with what’s happening in your industry, and to see what your competitors are doing. You can also use these filtered Twitter streams to identify possible opportunities for new product offerings based on what consumers are saying.

For example, if you manufacture cell phones, saving a search on “cell phones” or “cell phone makes” could help you identify consumer needs in this area. This would then help you to potentially develop an offering to meet this demand. Saving non-branded searches can also provide a structure for you to establish yourself as an expert in a particular topic by answering questions that people are asking in their tweets relating to your industry.

3. Find Influencers:
Twitter’s core functionality of following others provides an excellent way of keeping up with what leaders in your industry and other influencers are saying. By being on top of the latest knowledge, research and news related to your industry, you’ll be better positioned to improve and grow your business. To do this, first do research into who the influencers in your industry are, and then use Twitter’s search function to find them so you can add them as followers. You can also keep up with these influencers by creating Twitter lists. Doing this allows you to keep their tweets separate from your main tweetstream, and you can make the list private if you prefer.

4. Advertise Yourself:
Besides tweets themselves, your Twitter page is another avenue from which your brand messaging is conveyed on Twitter, so you should pay special attention to it when setting up your account. To start, think of a Twitter handle that is easy to remember and that is a close match to your brand name. By doing this, you’ll make it easier for people to follow you, since they’ll be better able to remember your page URL, and your page will be more likely to appear in search results for your brand name.

Once you’ve created your account, customise your page background with your own logo or brand colours. Also take care to fill out your profile as best you can – include a snappy bio, a link to your website, and your geographical location.

Something to keep an eye on is Twitter’s verification system, which allows you to place a badge on your page confirming that you are the official representative of your brand. Having a verification badge on your account gives you more credibility, which in turn will increase your brand exposure as people will be more likely to follow you if they’re looking for your brand. Although this feature is still in beta and Twitter is only manually verifying certain accounts, this should become widely available in the near future.

5. An Aggregator:
Although Twitter’s main strength is its real-time nature, this also means it can be overwhelming to keep on top of your Twitter stream, especially if you’re following a large number of people. The fact that the stream is constantly updating means that if you see a useful tweet, such as a link to a research article or news story relating to your business, it can quickly be lost as the day progresses.

To help you manage this, use Twitter’s “favorite” function to mark tweets throughout the day that you think are useful, and then come back and read them once a day or a couple of times a week. In this way, Twitter becomes a news aggregator akin to Google Reader, where you can use it to shore up information that will allow you to keep up with changes in your industry.