5 Reasons Twitter Wins Best Social Media Platform for Busy Entrepreneurs

photo credit: skersting66

I have a Twitter confession. After all these years online, I really haven’t paid much attention to Twitter. I feel bad about it, but it’s just that my social media experience is mostly with Facebook (I worked 2 years for a company that designed + developed pages and managed accounts exclusively for Facebook). Twitter seemed much less intuitive than Facebook, and because of my own limited time and resources, I just set up my Facebook posts to auto-post to Twitter.

At the time, Facebook was a great platform for my business, driving tons of traffic to my website, and creating endless networking opportunities to connect with interesting people and raise the visibility of my business. This all changed in the Fall of 2012 with Facebook’s algorithm changes (designed to drive more advertising revenue for Facebook). Posts that had once generated hundreds of views and numerous responses, were now being seen by just a handful of people. Even with targeted, paid advertising, I found people I had not targeted liked my page, while those I targeted remained unengaged. As a small business entrepreneur with limited time and resources, Facebook had simply become a waste of my social media time and energy.

I needed to find an alternative. Call me fickle, but I decided to put that time and energy into learning everything I could about Twitter–and I’m being rewarded for my efforts. Here are 5 reasons I’ve come up with (so far) for why Twitter is the Best Social Media Platform for Busy Entrepreneurs (click to tweet!) to invest their time:

1. Twitter Drives a Lot of Website Traffic – The number of new visitors to my website has increased significantly since finding my Twitter groove. I’ve only been actively engaged in growing my Twitter presence for three weeks now, and within that short period of time, Twitter has sent more traffic to my website than any other online source.
2. Website Traffic Generated from Twitter Stays a While – The average time visitors from Twitter spend on my site is 3+ minutes. This means the traffic Twitter is sending to my site is genuinely interested in the content.
3. It’s Easy to Find Great Content to Share on Twitter – you can follow anyone you want on Twitter. If you follow thought-leaders in your industry, it’s easy to find exciting and relevant content you can share with your own Twitter followers. This is a huge time-saver when you’re trying to make sure you have enough high-value content to share on your own social media outposts. As a bonus, when you share someone’s content by Retweeting it, they’ll likely say thanks, and will often follow you back.
4. Twitter is Great for Networking – I’ve made some exciting new connections since jumping on the Twitter bandwagon a few weeks ago. That’s really nice for me, since I live in a place that makes business networking in person difficult. If you live in an isolated area, or even if you don’t but you work alone, Twitter is an awesome way to discover and meet interesting people (click to tweet!) within and outside your industry online.
5. Twitter Lists Work Like a Mini-CRM for Small Business – you can learn more about this in Sarah Von Bargen’s post (link below), but in short, you can sort your Twitter contacts using Twitter’s List feature to keep track of different people for different reasons (and interact with them accordingly). You can make your lists public or private, depending on whether or not you want people to know you’ve added them to a list.
    
   Here’s a great example: someone recently added me to her public list called “Cool Twitter People” and I was immediately notified (and of course, flattered–who doesn’t want to be cool?). Do you think I’m going to forget about her any time soon? No way. She is on my radar, and it’s very likely I’ll share her content and possibly even send some referrals her way as a result. Smart, right?
    
   If you want to add someone to a list called “Prospects” you’ll be better off to make the list private (meaning the people you add won’t be notified). The neat thing about a list like this is you can keep an eye on the tweets of people you are interested in serving with your product or service, and notice opportunities to jump in the conversation and add value or solve problems when it makes sense.

Incredibly Helpful Twitter Articles

If you want to give Twitter a try, here’s a list of posts I have found to be the most helpful to me as I’ve been learning how to use and engage Twitter for myself and my business:

Twitter Tools I’m Loving Right Now

This is a short list of tools that are helping me manage Twitter right now–I’ll add to this list as I find more, but feel free to share your favorite tools in the comments!

Okay, It’s Your Turn!

What’s your Twitter story? Do you know of some tools or helpful resources that should be a part of this list? I would love to hear from you on this. Please share in the comments and be sure to connect with me on Twitter @normamaxwell. I look forward to checking out your tweets!

Hey there! If you have any questions, please feel free to drop me a line here or email me directly at norma [at] connectinteractivellc [dot] com. And if you like what you’re reading, be sure to subscribe or sign-up just below for email updates so you don’t miss a thing. I look forward to connecting with you!

By the Way… If you like what you read today, you’ll love this post: Essential Business Routines for Busy Entrepreneurs!

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