For businesses, Twitter can have a number of useful functions: Driving website traffic, promoting recent blog posts, building brand visibility, and cultivating a reputation for thought leadership, among other things. These are all noble and worthwhile goals for your company Twitter account, yet none of them are really attainable unless the Twitter account is followed and engaged with. In other words, people need to not only read your tweets but also retweet them to others.

How do you accomplish this? There is no big secret here, nothing particularly technical or complex. It’s simply a matter of providing value. Tweets will get engaged with—read and retweeted—when they’re worth the engagement. To build the kind of Twitter traction you need, in other words, you have to create a sense of authority, proving to colleagues and customers alike that you know what you are talking about, offer real insight into your industry, and are ultimately worth listening to.

That’s straightforward enough, but not necessarily easy. It begs the question: How do you turn your company’s Twitter account into a trusted and authoritative source?

Simple Steps to Build Authority

It’s not something you can do overnight. Rather, it requires you to spend a few minutes on Twitter every day, gradually building your following and developing content that matters to your community.

Some specific steps to take include:

• Find and follow people within your industry—people who are themselves interesting and authoritative. Gaining traction within your community requires you to really become enmeshed within that community. Use Twitter’s recommendations, its search window, and industry-specific hashtags to find people to follow. Don’t be afraid to follow your competitors; in fact, it’s wise to keep an eye on them and see how they’re using Twitter to their ends.
• Curate compelling content. Thought leadership is not necessarily the same thing as doing all the talking. Allowing other voices to be heard, by retweeting relevant content, is just as important. This shows that you’re really involved in your space, and it makes it clear to your followers that you’re not merely interested in self-promotion. Additionally, it gets the attention of the people you’re retweeting, which may prompt them to return the favor some time!
• Share some articles and blogs from elsewhere on the Web. Similar to retweeting, sharing some posts of your own, featuring content from around the Web—not necessarily your own branded content—is a great way to show industry involvement and general thought leadership.
• Share some insights of your own. Give something away—thought leadership in a 140-character dose. Provide a quick tip or observation that your customers will find helpful. And while you’re at it, use a program like Hootsuite or Buffer to schedule a post or two for the future—allowing you to maintain a more active Twitter presence without it draining quite so much of your time.
• Reply to people who tweet at you directly. This is a simple matter of good manners, but also of building a community and even providing customer service; simply put, if you want to brand yourself as a trusted authority, you’ve got to respond to the people who ask you questions.

Twitter can be an invaluable part of your integrated marketing strategy. See how you can make your social media marketing successful today. To talk about what that means, don’t hesitate to call our team today.