Trying To Find A Business (Or Just Any) Use For Twitter? [pt. 2]

Post by Guest Blogger Jason Lander of ShiftWise

In my post earlier this week I showed you how to set up a Twitter account. Now I’ll show you how it can benefit you as a hospital or staffing supplier in the healthcare staffing industry.

First, like all marketing efforts you have to think about your objective and strategy regarding how you will promote yourself or your company on Twitter. You need to also consider how you will provide some kind of value to the community.

Twitter is a social networking site that can certainly be used for business/marketing purposes. However, many people using Twitter aren’t on there for business reasons. Therefore, coming off as simply trying to promote your business without any strategy will ensure you’re treated like the guy at the party who won’t stop talking about himself.

Here are some goals/strategies you might want to consider:

• Build Brand Awareness
• Gain new customers
• Improve or expand upon your company image
• Monitor the activities of your competitors
• Measure customer satisfaction

Here are some suggested promotional ideas:

• Post linked items to articles on your website or other relevant sites
• Create surveys on how to better your business
• Share new job openings or opportunities
• Address customer complaints
• Offer discounts or rewards
• Show people how to use/benefit from your service
• Answer business related questions
• Promote company events
• Announce new product/service lines
  

Essentially, just because you heard about Twitter from your kids first doesn't mean that the fundamental rules of marketing don't apply. The most important thing to do is to listen to your followers and respond with content that is relevant, engaging and meets a need. If you do this correctly you will build relationships and gain followers. Ultimately this will result in the promotion of your business by not just you and your company, but also your followers! What better promotion is there?

The following video will show you how to get some business use (new leads, recruiting healthcare professionals, etc.) out of Twitter for your hosptial or staffing agency by making use of another application called TweetDeck. You can get similar functionality from other apps like Twhirl but I think Tweetdeck is the best.



Jason Lander is VP of Business Development for ShiftWise. For more of Jason's posts, you can visit his blog, the Staffing Robot.