Last week my article 8 Simple Steps to Growing a Quality Twitter Following was published on Social Media Examiner.  It shows how I set up a tweet plan of strategic scheduled tweets.  Some of the readers were surprised at the work I invest in setting up this scheduled tweet plan. So I thought I’d share my approach to using twitter for business. It’s a great way to get the value you want out of Twitter, whether it’s reaching international audiences or not.

There are 3 distinct business dimension in how I tweet.  And here they are.

1 – Marketing On Twitter

In my world of international business development marketing involves a lot of work. It’s the work you need to do to get to know people from scratch.  You need to invest more time in getting things right when marketing across cultures.

Twitter Plan: In the marketing portion of my Twitter plan, I create a separate set of tweets and schedule them in advance.  These are strategic tweets based on keywords. They become a branding tool because they give a very clear focus to my Twitter feed… no matter what happens during the day.

The main purpose of these scheduled tweets is to share useful evergreen information on my keywords.  These tweets provide a regular stream of useful content in my Twitter feed to attract the people I want to connect with.

It is a marketing exercise and like most marketing it requires a fair bit of grunt work.  You need to:

• Clearly define your marketing objective: What you want to get out of Twitter?
• Identify the right marketing tactics: What keywords are going to help you reach your objective?
• Adapt your content to your audience: What types of tweets resonate most with your audience?
• Establish the right time to implement your plan: When will you schedule your tweets?

You’ll also need to keep track of how you implement your plan and listen attentively to the feedback you get once you implement your plan. Have a look at 8 Simple Steps to Growing a Quality Twitter Followin for more details.

But you also need to do more than marketing on Twitter.

2 – Sales Becomes Making Connections On Twitter

In addition to the evergreen tweets which provide a marketing structure to my Twitter feed, you also need to respond to people and events throughout the day.   These are the tactical on-the-go tweets. These tweets help to provide a soft pull in the towards your objectives for Twitter. In the offline world this is the equivalent of sales prospecting.

Always keep your Twitter goal in mind because you can lose direction easily on Twitter. It’s such a social environment, you can spend a day, or even a couple of days without talking about subjects relevant to your business. These conversations are great to help build relationships. But they can easily get you sidetracked.

Twitter Plan: Connect with people regularly with your Twitter objective in mind.  There are a few tricks to keep your conversations closer to the topics of key importance to you.  Hashtags are one of these tricks and you can use hashtags in a variety of ways.  Many people use them as “tags” which also become a branding tool.  But you can also use hashtags more proactively to:

• Create meetups: to gather people interested in your subject at a specific time to get to know each other better
• Create live Twitter interviews: so people can listen in and get to know you more

These tweets relate to your daily communication needs.

3 – Public Relations On Twitter

Public relations is extremely important on social media. It plays an omnipresent role of engagement and developing relationships across all social media.

Twitter Plan: These are the tweets and interactions you need for engagement.  Public relations on Twitter can be separated into 3 categories:

• Tweets: to connect, reach out, thank people, show recognition, return favors and generally communicate with people
• Social actions: these are the little things you do to nurture relationships on social media such as: following people, including people on your lists, following other people’s lists, sharing things and showing recognition on social bookmarking sites and other social media sites
• Personal connections: you can only do so much on Twitter which is why you need to make the personal connection outside of Twitter as soon as you can.  And this can be delicate to evaluate and may require advanced social skills.  After establishing a closer connection through direct messages on Twitter, you can then connect by email, phone call, Skype call or even meet in person.  Again you need to find the best context for these personal connections.

Just like in the offline world, some people are better than others at engaging on Twitter.  In addition to the people skills you also need to be good at evaluating the context and finding the right time and the right way to communicate with people.

Use Twitter To Reach International Audiences

When you have a better understanding of your own communication on Twitter you’ll find it easier to adapt your Twitter communication to get the results you want.

What about using Twitter to connect with people abroad?  Well there is one important point to remember in international marketing.  You rarely get it 100% right the first time.  This means you also need to cultivate feedback and continually adjust your communication for a stronger connection. This also applies when using Twitter to connect with an international audience.

This is what I do to develop my international business network and you can too… if you approach Twitter with a coherent international communication plan.