Building our Twitter community
(@CoolSchoolBus)

Vancouver School Bus has been around for over 2 years, providing private bus charters for clientele that includes wedding parties, event planners, conference planners, schools and colleges and larger corporate organizations with hundreds of employees.

 

As it appears, the need for social media in businesses is becoming a necessity. Social media is part of a company's brand. Most of our clients are on Twitter and are typically quite active. Marketing these days, has moved dramatically towards use of the Internet and away from traditional forms of media (print ads, radio or television commercials) which are both more costly and not as measurable.

 

Most micro businesses and start-ups operate under a strict marketing budget consideration so its imperative to find advertising channels with little to no cost. Today’s social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are all free and offer promising ways to connect with our customers. Depending on the type of client we serve, individuals, small groups and big corporations can all be found in all or a combination of these social networks. Social media is more or less a prerequisite for doing business these days.

 

How we plan to use Twitter

It’s been suggested that we start by listening first, before jumping in.

 

Why start with Twitter? We are using Twitter as our starting point for the following reasons:

 

In 2011, it had around 300 million registered users. We’ve connect with some of our clients and spotted many more.

 

The short format of a tweet (140 characters at most) allows informal collaboration and quick information sharing which is more instant than blogging and email.

 

It allows us to reach large (and growing) groups of people with a single tweet. We can share information and converse with people outside of our current network.

 

We can gather real time intelligence and obtain valuable feedback almost immediately. For example, it is quite common to posted a tweet and get multiple responses from the people your Twitter community within minutes.

 

Using the third party application Hootsuite, we’ll be able to filter through the sea of information so that we can pick out what our clients are talking about in an organized way.

 

We hope to be able to answer customer inquiries and do customer service real-time as soon as we get the hang of it.

 

Please follow our Twitter account @coolschoolbus. We hope to stick to the following Twitter strategy:

 

1. Tweet regularly.

It is always important to be active in social media. But how much should we be tweeting for it to be useful? Some users are constantly tweeting, which can become irritating. Rather than tweeting just for the sake of flooding Twitter, we want to think more about the quality and helpfulness of what we’re tweeting about. It should either be informative or interesting enough to get people to notice.

 

We’ll be tweeting news on transportation and some interesting events happening in Vancouver. From time-to-time, we’ll also tweet random facts we find entertaining.

 

There is no magic number of tweets you should send each day to be successful (Just as there is no magic number of emails you should send each day). We’ll just be using it as another daily communications tool just like we use email.

 

2. Be responsive.

Once a business has signed up for Twitter, it should be ready for questions, comments and sometimes, complaints. It is crucial for any business to be responsive to the needs of its customers and be patient in handling queries from potential clients.

 

In the case of the Vancouver School Bus Charters, we see queries as customer service opportunities. It is even more crucial to handle complaints by listening and addressing the problems/concerns promptly.

 

3. Associate wisely.

One measure of a Twitter account’s popularity is the number of followers, but it doesn't tell the whole story. The most important thing in social media is having the right audience of responsive Twitter users in your chosen community. To begin, we’ll be sticking mainly to people and businesses in British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest, with a focus on Vancouver.

 

After following people or businesses, we’ll organize them into Twitter lists so we can view certain lists at a time. Listing others is an online courtesy because it makes it easier for my followers to browse interesting people to connect with by looking through my lists. To learn how to create Twitter lists, click here.

 

4. Be genuine, friendly and open minded. 

People look at your last few tweets to see if you are worth following. To gain Twitter following, we’ll have to be genuine, friendly and conversational with our audience. If there are any negative rants about our service, we’ll try to stay positive and address the issues one at a time. Joining Twitter conversations is sort of like joining a conversation at a cocktail party. As the people who like to network know, you never know what might happen but the point is that you showed up to the party in the first place!

 

So go ahead and follow us on Twitter! @CoolSchoolBus

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Tags: @coolschoolbus, Social Media, Twitter, Twitter Strategy, Vancouver School Bus

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 20th, 2012 at 1:52 pmand is filed under Company News, Partnerships. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.