To __________,
I’ve been following you on Twitter. I know you’re not taking it too seriously right now, and when the time comes, you’d probably want to outsource management of the account to me anyway, but I wanted to give you a quick crash course on how to leverage it effectively for the time being.
Businesses need to use Twitter for “pulling,” not “pushing.” The old school of thought in business and marketing was to “push” out content, usually a sales pitch of some sort, and hope for the best. Traditionally, that worked. On a “social” network, however, it tends to have an adverse effect. Businesses that don’t know any better continuously post information about themselves that nobody cares about and they continue to sit on a lonely island because of it.
The best way to attract more interest and eyeballs is to engage. This is best accomplished by “pulling” in content. In other words, try logging on to Twitter as a reader, or a company wanting to learn something. Use search.twitter.com to search for keywords relevant to your industry, use wefollow.com to find influencers in your area, and follow everybody that you deem fit. From there, retweet their meaningful tweets and send @ replies to anybody that you want to ignite a conversation with. A quality Twitter timeline should have plenty of @ symbols running through it. Otherwise, you look like a boring one-way business that is trying to sell me something. Who would want to follow an account like that? Would you?
Think about who your demographic is and what is most relevant to you as a business and get out there. The more conversations you have, the more memorable you will become.