The most effective way of using Twitter to build your business is to keep answering questions related to your industry, business and products. Tools like InboxQ help you do this quickly and easily.

The use of Twitter is emerging as a very strong trend on the Web. Like other social media tools, Twitter too was initially seen only as a way for teens to pass their time, but of late, businesses have started realising that it is a great marketing tool. Indian businesses too are experimenting with Twitter—some businessmen even include their Twitter stream ID on their email signatures nowadays.

Be prepared to clear doubts

Twitter can be used very effectively to build your business. It has been found that answering questions is one of the best ways of engaging and growing your customer base. Naturally, everybody likes a person who clears their doubts or solves their problems. That ‘friendly neighbourhood businessman’ image is very effective in increasing brand recall!
Potential customers often post questions about your product, your business, or even your industry. If it’s you rather than somebody else who answers those questions, people not only get to know more about your business, but the feeling of having interacted one-on-one with a key stakeholder increases their confidence and boosts your brand’s recall value. If the question had been posted at the time of evaluating a purchase, your prompt answer might well be the clinching factor that closes the deal in favour of your brand. Moreover, if people find your answers really useful, they might turn into ‘followers’—reading every message that you post. The result is a loyal customer base.

A tool to find those people whose problems you can address
So, you are all set to log in to Twitter and answer questions, right? But how do you plan to go about this? It is not that easy. People will not be emailing their questions to you, or even addressing their doubts directly to you. They would simply be posting these on their own Twitter streams or in other conversations that they engage in. It is up to you to find the questions related to your business and answer them—and, well, you need to do it before your competitor does!
While it is possible to find related questions using basic keyword searches on Twitter, this process is time consuming and not always effective. You might end up spending more time finding questions rather than answering them. We are sure your busy schedule would not allow that. You could solve this problem using tools such as InboxQ.

InboxQ is a free tool that you can download from www.inboxq.com. Choose a version depending on the browser you use—Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox. Once you download and install it, you need to spend a few minutes to set up campaigns—i.e., let InboxQ know the keywords related to your products, businesses and industry. Thereafter, the tool keeps monitoring the thousands of conversations that happen on Twitter, and as soon as it comes across a question related to your campaign, it delivers it in real-time to your Web browser. If you have a minute to spare, you could answer the question immediately. Else, with a single click you can save it in your to-do list to answer later. To help you evaluate the effectiveness of your participation, InboxQ also keeps track of whether the answer resulted in any followers. This means that if somebody opts to become your follower on reading your answers, InboxQ lets you know. So you also come to know whether you are on the right track!
Now, that is a handy tool. But, before you start off, do remember that your motive while answering a question should be to genuinely solve a person’s problem or satisfy their need for information. It should never be obvious that you are trying to promote a brand or sell a product. That will follow, as a natural result.