A complete guide to using Twitter to build your brand online

This article is a part of the ET’s Online Brand Building (ETOBB) Series. In this post, I will try to make a very good and complete guide for utilizing twitter’s ability to build your brand online. Twitter is a very newly emerged resource that has become very essential part of your online brand building. The ability of twitter to increase your brand recognition and sales has been tested and proved via researches. Twitter used to contain only techie audiences until Oprah has featured it on her show. Since then, twitter has seen a great surge in non-techie audience and hence has become an invaluable means of brand building for not just tech companies but also companies of other niche like entertainment, adult, green products, sports, manufacturing etc.
As always, here I am going to put down a numbered list of the methods to utilize twitter to build your brand online. This list is made as chronological as possible. The points are short (like the tweets) and sweet. Each of them will surely be explained in detail with the tools to be used in the coming series of posts.

Build Your Account:

Building your account is obviously the first and important action to be done towards building your brand online. This can be done by the following procedure:

• Create a Twitter profile for your brand that is attractive and with all the important factors taken into consideration.
• Find and follow people targeted to your niche using WeFollow  Tweep Directory.
• Do the maintenance work (unfollowing non-reponding tweeps, adding new followers, crossfollowing etc. ) on your profile every 3 days using Buzzom.

Form indispensable Relations:

Building a personal and long-lasting  relationship with your customers brings about the good will and loyal customers to your brand. These people not only use your service but also promote it to their friends. This can be done by solving their problems, retweeting their tweets, responding to queries etc. The best tools to be used in doing this are either of  TweetDeck (AIR App) or TwitZap (Web solution).

Publicize your Twitter Profile:

Advertise your twitter profile from different other brand building resources.  Use twitter widgets to publicize your profiles. Add your twitter profile link to all your forum signatures, mail signatures, blogs, websites, business cards etc. You may also use  some innovative advertising methods like those of Ashton Kutcher Some of the important tools that help in this task are twittercounter , twitt-twoo wordpress plugin, twitstamp etc.

Analyze your followers:

As twitter is a continuous stream and your tweets could go unnoticed in the stream. Also, you cannot spend your entire online time just for Tweeting. So you need to know the timings when majority of your followers are active and tweet in those times. So you have to analyze the activity of your followers and know when the majority of them are active. You also need to know the topics that interest them more and their clicking habits etc. The important tool that could help you in this task is twitteranalyzer.

Establish Credibility:

Whatever you do, you need to keep building credibility as your main motive. When you evolve as a credible source for the service you provide, you will surely be recommended by all your followers to get their task done. You can build credibility by retweeting only good information, tweeting some good tips and tricks, helping the followers etc. This cannot be done with the basic web interface of twitter. So you need to use some very good twitter client like tweetdeck, twitzap etc.

Brand Monitoring:

Once you go into the world of internet, your brand will have to face the happiness and grievances of people directly. Sometimes your service may go wrong and you will face the wrath of the customers if not acted upon early. You cannot delay in this kind of matters and hence you need to monitor the tweets of users on your brand and reply them accordingly. If they gave out a testimonial retweet it, if they ask for support, provide it and if someone is grieving, try to know the reason and solve it. This builds up a positive review on your service. Important tools that help are yacktrack, social mention and tweetdeck.

Organize Giveaways:

Organize occasional contests by giving away some interesting prizes. See to it that the prizes are not so costly but spur the tweeps to participate. The best resource for organizing twitter contests is twitthis. Ofcourse, you can organize the contest without any tool like it.

Profit your Followers:

There is no reason for others to follow you unless you benefit them. So you need to profit them. You can do this by recommending your best followers, retweeting their tweets, answering queries etc. You can do this by your twitter client. You should also use #hashtags and take part in the trending topics.

Tags: Brand, Brand Building, brand exposure, Building Online Brand, ET Special, ETOBB, Guerilla Marketing, Internet Marketing, media optimization, Online Brand Building, search engine submission, seo, signature space, Social Media, Twitter, Twitter advertising, Twitter Brand Building, twitter tips and tricks, using twitter, White Hat SEO