Twitter is for much more than blasting out your sales message to brides – it’s a valuable networking tool for anyone in the wedding industry.
You can use it to build relationships with other suppliers, find opportunities (photo shoots, guest blogging, last minute bookings) and keep up to date with industry news. Here’s 3 ways to get more from Twitter.
Conversations
To stand out from the crowd on twitter, you need to be active – and that doesn’t mean setting up a stream of automated tweets on Monday morning or simply tweeting all your Facebook updates. So each time you log in to twitter, actively look for items you can reply to, comment on or re-tweet. Do this regularly and you’ll soon build up a network of twitter friends and contacts.
Use twitter lists to make sure you don’t miss opportunities to connect with the people you’d like to network with – for example a particular venue or event planner. Once you’ve made the connection through twitter, an approach for a meeting will be much easier.
Chats
These are organised sessions, usually an hour long, where tweeters with a shared interest (or location) get together online. They are a great way to build your followers and make connections.
There are 2 types of Twitter chats – networking or question and answer.
Both use hashtags – to join in, add the relevant hashtag to your tweets.
There are networking hours for wedding businesses including #weddinghour #vintagewedhour and it’s also worth seeing if there’s a general chat hour for your town or region. To get the most from these, be generous in re-tweeting others and adding to your followers.
Q&A hours are usually managed by one person and you can join in with either questions or answers, depending on the structure. You can also use Twitter to publicise online chat sessions on Facebook or your website.
Tweetups
Tweetups are face to face networking meetings organised via Twitter. They can be informal – a few local business owners meeting for a coffee or drink, or more organised events. A really good way to put faces to twitter names and build business relationships with your online contacts.
Don’t forget to follow Wedding Business Success on Twitter and let us know about your chats and tweetups – we’ll be happy to retweet them for you.