Seven things my business is doing with Twitter

We all see lots of discussion about what to do with Twitter. I wrote about what you and I might do with Twitter personally in my last post. I want to share with you how my business, MBO Partners, uses Twitter. Like most businesses, we have just started, but we have begun to get some good results and I hope our experience will give you some ideas about how your business can use Twitter to solve problems you might have.

MBO Partners provides services to independent consultants and freelancers. I like to say if you can find your own work, MBO Partners will be your business. We will invoice your clients, collect your payments, deposit your money in an online account for you, reimburse your business, medical and child care expenses on a pre-tax basis, and give you access to pre-tax paid insurance and retirement plans, all for only 5% of your billings. A pretty good deal.

We market to independent professionals and the companies that use them. We constantly look for new ways to reach out to our market. Twitter, used in the right way, provides a good solution to that problem. Here is what we have done so far.

1. All our execs and marketing team have started using Twitter. For each one, we created Twitter page backgrounds that promote our company. Each of us has subjects that we will listen for and tweet about. We want to provide useful information, engage others, and answers questions – basically become a great participant in the Twitterverse.
2. We’ve learned to use some Twitter tools like TweetDeck, Hootsuite, and Twellow. Just like any job, it really helps to have the right tools. Using Twitter becomes much easier and more effective if you use the right tools.
3. We follow tweets about using Twitter for business and tweets about the contingent workforce and freelancers to see what they have to say. You should spend time listening before you speak.
4. We sentout tweets promoting our blog posts on our executive and corporate web sites. We want to share useful information with the markets we serve. We believe that if they see value in the information we share, they will see value in the services we offer.
5. We tweet from our corporate twitter account concerning information about independent professionals and news about our company. We want to keep our name in the Twitter market place.
6. We have promoted ourwebinars for independentson topics like, “How to set your bill rate.” We tweet a link to an invitation page where those interested can sign up. Again, we focus on providing useful information to those that might use our service.
7. We promote our open job positions. Wouldn’t you want to hire new people who know how to explore the latest on the Internet? Twitter gives us one more way to get our name out and share positive news – we have open positions to fill!

We have really just begun, but our blogs and corporate web site have started getting hits from Twitter.  We have had independents start checking out our business by engaging our team in conversation on Twitter and attending our webinars.  It looks promising, and we have more ideas we want to try.

The best thing about Twitter is it’s free.  Well it might seem that way, but  learning, planning and actually using Twitter take time that we could spend on other business activities. We won’t know the ROI from this for a while, but we believe the return will be good.

How are you using Twitter in your business? Do you find it valuable?

Try reading…

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