Building Brand Loyalty through Twitter

That’s quite a broad topic. Broad enough to write really thick books on, in fact. So let’s focus on one aspect of it, and pick one that’s fairly modern and not fully explored yet. A lot of businesses these days are looking to social networking sites to connect to customers and work up hype on whatever product or deal they’re coming up with next. Big companies, the ones that have been established by years of hard-earned profits, probably don’t need to do this as much. No, it’s the small and medium-sized guys that could likely profit the most from using something like Twitter.

The concept sounds stupid at first glance. Short messages, no longer than a hundred words and change. The length is too short for anything except pointless chatter – which, to be fair, is what makes up most of the “tweets” you encounter. That doesn’t mean it can’t be used to keep customers loyal to your business, though.

Part of how this is done is by keeping in touch with the market. Advertising gets the word out, but it doesn’t quite reach out to people. A business needs to keep its ear to the ground, to hear the beating pulse of their markets. One way to do this is to set up a twitter account for the business itself, using it as a central hub for your customers.

The trick to doing this is to promote customer interaction. Make informal surveys on the page, like asking people what they like best about one of your products. Ask questions and be sure to reply to any feedback they have. Give them the feel of being connected, of being more than just numbers to the corporate monolith. Sometimes, it might even be advisable to follow some customers’ accounts, again to give the impression that the business is human and not some profit-obsessed machine. This is aside from linking to important things, like press releases, new promos, or product debuts.

A lot of analysts think that, thanks to social networking, building brand loyalty is going to be more about building customer communities than constant improvement of the product. Twitter and social networking sites like it can help a business prepare for that, while also helping tap a wider market at the same time.

According to http://brandbysocial.com