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Twitter Marketing – Using Twitter to Promote Your Business

Written by: Zeke Camusio

Article Overview: Twitter is a micro-blogging platform. It lets you post up to 140 characters at a time. Some people post their status every 5 minutes (“Waiting for the bus”, “On the bus”, “Walking home”) and companies use Twitter to get the word out about new products, blog posts, and other random stuff. Companies from all over the world have Twitter accounts and thousands of people following them. Some of these companies are Apple, Intel, H&R Block, and Zappos. Barrack Obama has over 38k followers! To leverage the Twitter potential you need to have people following you. That is, people that want to be updated on what you are up to.

Twitter Marketing – Using Twitter to Promote Your Business

Step 1: Importing Contacts
When you sign up for Twitter you will have a chance to import contacts from Gmail, Hotmail, and your own address book. Do it.

Step 2: Complete Your Profile
Make sure all your profile is complete and include a link to your website. Add “http” at the beginning of it to make it clickable. Personalize the colors and the sidebar on your profile page. Use keywords in your profile so others can find you.

Step 3: Understand the Dynamics of Twitter
Twitter is not a marketing tool; it’s a social tool. That means:
- Don’t spam
- Follow other users
- Be active in the community (comment and post frequently)
- Post useful information
- Don’t post every 10 minutes
- Engage in conversations. Retweet (reply to other tweets) often
- Don’t promote yourself. Share cool stuff. To give your company exposure, do it the smart way. Direct your followers to a blog post with useful information and have that post invite users to take action. Don’t try to take people from Twitter to your checkout page directly.

Step 4: Build Your Audience
There are several things that you can do to build your audience:
- Put a link to “Follow Me on Twitter” in your email signature, forums signature, website, and maybe even your business cards
- Invite people to follow you on Twitter at the end of each blog post you create
- Find Twitter users that you really look up to and see who is following them. Follow these people. Once they see you are following them, they will follow you.
- See who is following your friends and follow them. They will follow you too.
- Use Twitter directories to find members who are likely to follow you. My favorites are Just Tweet It and Twellow.
- Use the search feature to find profiles that you want to follow. You can use Twitter’s RSS feed to be notified every time a tweet is made containing a certain keyword.

Step 5: Watch Your Following/Followers Ratio
Try to have a balance between people you follow and people that follow you. If 1,000 people follow you and you only follow 10 folks, you will be seen as selfish and snob. If 10 people follow you and you follow 1,000, you will be seen as a spammer.

Some tips that will help you keep both numbers balanced:
- Grow slow. Instead of adding 500 new friends in one day, add maybe 50 and wait for them to follow you. Then do another 50.
- Use a tool like Friend or Follow to see who is following you that you are not following and who you are following that is not following you. This tool is very useful to balance the number of following/followers.
- Avoid the “follow/no follow” tactic. Some people follow others so they follow them and then they stop following those folks. Avoid this practice if you don’t want to look like a spammer.

Step 6: Post Useful Tweets
Make it worthwhile to follow you. If you’ve found something that your audience might find useful, tweet it. You can use Twitter tools to automatically tweet your blog posts.

Share what you do but avoid “selling”. For example, if you are a web developer you can tweet “we just finished designing the website for ABC Widgets” but avoid something like “Custom Web Design from $899”.

Step 7: Learn from the Experts
Find 10-20 users with over 300 followers and see what they are doing right. Get ideas and implement them.

Related Articles
  How Twitter can have a postive effect on your business
  Blogging, Articles and Twitter - A Powerful Marketing Combination
  Four Easy Twitter Tools to Supplement Your Marketing
  Whats all the fuss about Twitter
  You're Addicted to Twitter If You..

Article Tags: address book, business cards, checkout page, company exposure, conversations, cool stuff, email signature, followers, hotmail, marketing tool, reply, search feature, signature website, social tool, step 1, step 2, step 3, tweet, tweets, twitter



Related Forum Posts
Re: Twitter vs Facebook - I use Facebook pages for Business and rarely ever use Twitter. I hace lost count of the no. of Hotels that I have visited, regarding their marketing campaigns, that may have 5k Facebook Fans and only 100 followers on Twitter. It is a lot more difficult to engage with people on Twitter and thus harder to gain traction. If you are a business like Nike, then Twitter is great, but if you are an SME, then focus on Facebook or LinkedIn (if you are providing a professional service.) You can always have your Facebook feed directly in to Twitter, so you can have a presence on both, but do the work on one. Also check out ping.fm for managing campaigns - it is a free tool, and a great time saver.
Re: Using Twitter To Double Your Traffic? - I'm sure in many cases Twitter sends more traffic than Search Engines because most people don't have good enough SE rankings to get SE traffic. But anyone can get Twitter traffic. The problem is that Twitter traffic won't convert for the most part and SE traffic will. I'd venture to say that 98% of the time getting just 100 visitors from search is better than getting 2000+ from Twitter.
How to Use Twitter to Market Products? - How do you use Twitter to market products? Has the Twitter route given you good results? Please share your experience and ideas on how to use Twitter to take a product to the customers. Thank you in advance.
Re: Social Media Works If You Do It Right... - Hi Michelle, Ah, but it seems hashtags are still being used by a lot of people - including Twitter! So I would still use them for your keywords. It's just that if you are searching for something on Twitter you can either go the #hashtag route, or do a direct search on the Twitter homepage. I guess you could use #hashtags when searching on the Twitter homepage as well! DH
Re: Facebook or Twitter? - Thanks for the feedback guys! I personally started with Twitter and am now moving over to Facebook. I polled people on both my accounts and (not surprisingly) the Twitter people said Twitter and the Facebook people said Facebook! The actual order of my social media presence looks like this: 1) LinkedIn (with little success) 2) Twitter 3) YouTube 4) Facebook


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