Let’s be honest: When businesses talk about embracing social media, everyone is almost always referring to Facebook. But did you know that Twitter — Facebook’s ADD sister — has more than 1 billion registered users worldwide? Huge number, isn’t it? Even more interesting, one study indicates that 66 million Americans will have Twitter accounts within the next two years. Wouldn’t it be great if you could embrace a piece of that pie to help build your brand, business or service?

The three biggest advantages Twitter can provide your hunting business are:

1. A Direct Pipeline to Consumer Trends

Businesses used to spend gobs of time and money analyzing their customer base. Truth be told, old-school marketing and demographic research still trumps anything we can do on social media. However, to ignore the potential treasure trove of insights we can glean firsthand from our audiences would be a major mistake (and one that is made routinely today).

Twitter operates in the here and now. Savvy consumers provide insight feedback on this platform and aren’t afraid to share details on what they like and don’t like about certain products and services. Phase 1 of your social media strategy should include some form of reporting system on what the audience members are saying. Consider your fans as your focus group. What do they want from your product or service, and how good are you at delivering it?

2. Outstanding Customer Service

Your fans not only expect it, they crave it, and you need to take this seriously. Ask any successful businessperson, and they’ll invariably tell you the cornerstone of their success is relating to the public and over-delivering on the customer promise. It’s simple, but it’s so often overlooked in today’s environment. 

Twitter allows you to control the message and, more importantly, address customers in a timely fashion. When someone airs a grievance on social media, it’s almost always out of frustration from lack of communication. By addressing their concerns on this platform, you not only help that one customer, you tell the entire demographic that your business is different than your competitor’s. You care about them to the point of replying to someone’s negative Tweet on a Saturday. That goes a long way toward building trust and loyalty among your customers.

The hunting community is populated with passionate individuals. Your passion for the sport and for your business/service are seen as one in the same when you deploy your staff to cover all the bases during regular work hours and after hours on social media.

3. Brand Awareness

This isn’t third on the list by accident, and that should tell you something. The biggest mistake businesses make on any social media platform is they believe that awareness is everything. If you beat your drum loud enough, people will start noticing you, right? Well, kind of. Awareness is important and, yes, it’s kind of the whole reason why most people are on social media, but, really, it comes with the territory. In other words, if you’re investing in social media, awareness is pretty much automatic if you do things even half right.

Twitter is more forgiving than Facebook. I don’t care how good your content is, if you post something on Facebook every two hours, people are going to go into their settings and either hide your posts or unlike you. With Twitter, the message is going to be drowned out within an hour (or even a few minutes depending on your number of followers), so it provides a much more flexible messaging option.

Also, with Twitter you don’t need to play the content balancing act that you have to with Facebook. Savvy Facebook users learn how to manage posts of all genres (awareness, branding and commerce) and when and how to post them.

Check back soon! In my next blog post, I’ll give you some proven tips for shortening your Twitter learning curve.