Imagine being able to communicate with your customers at any hour of the day on your time or their time? If you have a business that cares about your customer service and their overall experience then there is no better platform than Twitter.

While there are many ways to interact with your customers on Twitter here are a few that I think are the most important.

Reputation Management

If you are a brand like Southwest Airlines or Starbucks you can monitor Twitter for your brand name. There are apps available for you to monitor this automatically, but for the newbie, all you have to do is go to search.twitter.com and type in your brand name.  There you can monitor what people are saying about you.  There is no better “secret shopper” than Twitter.  It is a new frontier when it comes to customer surveys.

Be Proactive
Say for example you sell a product that has been recalled. Tell your customers first before they hear it on the news.  Let them have the inside scoop on what’s going on.  If you are having a sale that starts on the 1st of the month, consider a special Twitter sale that starts two days earlier and give your followers a little advantage.

Be Reactive
If you see people talking smack about your company, respond.  Don’t just try and avoid complaints.  If your company made a mistake, step up and fix it.  Transparency is a good thing in Web 2.0.  It’s a different world now and social media is not going away.  Learn to live with it and grow with it.

Promote Yourself

You have to begin by building your audience.  You can do this a few ways.

Email
If you have an email list of customers, let them know they can follow you on Twitter. Make sure your confirmation emails or email responders have your Twitter address at the bottom of your signature.

In Person
If you own a shop where customers walk in, make a sign telling them to follow you on Twitter.  If it were me, I would add it to all receipts as well.  If you have employees with name tags, put it under their name too.

On Twitter
After you search for your brand, take it a step further and search for your product or your town or your industry.  Engage Twitter users and build relationships that are honest and natural. Don’t force anything.

Reward
Have contests or give Twitter coupon codes for your followers to use.  If it’s worthy, they will share it with their friends and so on.  A well thought out contest could go viral and you really can’t get a better ROI than that.

Engage

This means use Twitter.  Don’t just set up an account…TWEET.  Don’t hire some high school kid t be your company’s voice on Twitter.  Your brand evangelist has to be someone that knows the ins and outs of the company.  Someone who has been there a long time.  It is really a very important job.  Don’t just pick a random person.  How often should you tweet?  At least once a day, if not more and always respond to your replies and direct messages.

Be the Expert

Let’s say you sell insurance.  If you have a blog (which you should) it’s likely you blog about the topic.  When you do you tweet the links out to your followers for them to have as a resource.  Don’t stop there.  When news happens in your industry be the one to tweet it.  It doesn’t all have to be about you.  Tweet links to other news sources in addition to yours.  Your followers will appreciate that and so will some of your peers.

I could really go on and on, but this website is for the Twitter newbie and I don’t want to scare you off.  If you want more you can check out the new guide for businesses that Twitter put out.

Most importantly, don’t wait any longer.  Tweet today. Don’t miss the boat, it has not sailed yet.