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How to Market Your Business on Twitter

Guest post by: Peter Grundner

Article Overview: Twitter has many uses. One such use is to use is to market your business.

How to Market Your Business on Twitter

How to Market Your Business on Twitter Ok, since you're reading this article, we are assuming you have already read our first article "Getting Started with Twitter", and have actually created a profile. Congratulations! Did you put together a decent profile? Cool background? Great! Have you found a few people to follow? You have entered the onramp to the latest digital super highway and you're ready to accelerate into the fast lane and make big bucks in 140 characters or less. Yay.

If you have not, go back to your "Settings" page and fulfill these steps first.

Next, be sure to test the waters and actually write some updates. Again, this is not about being "perfect." Just tap into your stream of thought and write something...anything. This will exponentially accelerate you Twitter education and who knows - you may be surprised at who relates to you!

Don't have enough people to follow? Just navigate around Twitter (especially the "Find People" link) - or even the web - visit your favorite blogs, people's Facebook profiles etc. Almost everyone now has a Twitter box. Just click on it, which should transport you to their profile. The next step is to click on the "Follow" button and voix la! you are now following them. Again, most of the people you choose to follow will then follow you in return. And remember, if you start following a company or a person and their updates are way too frequent or totally irrelevant to you, you can unfollow them just as easily.

Now What?

Let's take one step back so you can start with a clear perspective. The good news is that whatever you've invested in marketing your business thus far (both financially and by trial, error and success), will significantly help you on Twitter too. The bad news is that, like all other communication vehicles, it's not the medium alone that brings you sales, but what you do with it. Your degree of success on Twitter will be directly related to your understanding of advertising and marketing in general.

But don't despair - if you are not a sophisticated marketer, we have help!! The truth is that the best many college graduates with degrees in marketing forget the most critical ingredient - common sense. We have many step by step lessons on marketing that can bring you up to speed very quickly. Visit these articles: Marketing Basics, Finding &Targeting Your Niche Market, and Diversifying Your Advertising (to name a few of over 120).

As the above articles address, your job is to wrap your mind around the heads of people you're trying to reach. Who is your target audience? (Women 18-25? Males 35-48? Seniors? Interested in subjects like Gardening?) Why are they on Twitter - or any other medium for that matter? What is their mindset as they spend time there? This is where your common sense comes in. You are yourself a consumer, so what kinds of messages/ads/headlines/thoughts make you interested?

Businesses Use Twitter for Many Reasons

The original plan was for Twitter to also be accessible with mobile phones, so tweets are limited to 140 characters (thus the text messages). Some refer to it as a vehicle for "micro-blogs" or very short updates, ideas or responses. Bear in mind that tweets need to be extremely concise.

Here are some of the reasons both home businesses and gigantic corporations use Twitter:

Generate new prospects

Announce new offers and opportunities

Instant press releases

Monitor what's being said about their company

Get honest feedback on their company or industry

Offer live updates from a convention or industry event

Engage with customers and prospects for continual "feel good" experiences

Education

If you're not sure what you'd like to accomplish at this point - don't stress over it. Whatever your goals are today, the good news is that they can change tomorrow.

The fastest way to comprehend Twitter for business marketing is to see what successful businesses are doing. Just go to "Find People" (top right), then instead of typing in a name, click on "selected users" (high profile companies, celebrities, etc). Pick a few interesting ones and start following them (check the box to the left of their icon and then click the big button "follow"). Watch their tweets, click on their links, and see how they entice engagement...and then where they transport you when you respond. I learned a lot by following Whole Foods' and Jet Blue's tweets. Interestingly, their tweets often include a tiny url (TinyURL - great resource for reducing long urls) which offers an easy transport to their main website for more details. You can also type in keywords like "Healthy Eating" or "Home Businesses" to get contacts...think about 100 keywords in your industry and you'll find the right audience.

Use Twitter to Generate New Leads:

The power in Twitter is its ability to get you exposure with lots of like minded people. Since this platform only allows messages that are 140 characters or less, you need to grab their attention and then drive them someplace that can engage them on a deeper level - such as a website or blog, or your Twitter profile. The strongest skill you can develop and apply here is Headline Writing. You have to get a person's attention before they're going to stop and read your article - or even finish reading your tweet. Newspaper editors are masters at giving you a great headline on page one, and just enough of the story to make you stop what you're doing and turn to page 23. All you're trying to do is get them to want more. Remember that a headline is NOT the meat of the article - it's only the appetizer. You're not making the sale on the tweet - just putting out a few bird seeds. How To Write Powerful Headlines

To take full advantage of this possibility on Twitter, it's best if you have already created a website, blog or other digital platform that is dynamic and more than a digital brochure. A brochure website is stagnant, and offers mere basics - info on what you do, contact info, etc. Building A Web Site. Hopefully, you have found ways to engage your visitors and turn them into prospects, and then actually become part of their lives (newsletters, blogs, customer relationship marketing, etc).

How to post URLs. Twitter is based on 140 character updates. If you have a really long URL, that doesn't leave much room for Most people on Twitter use TinyURL to take a long URL and make it short. Give it a shot if you have a long URL that you want to market on Twitter. Be aware however, that using a direct URL will help your SEO effort...Tiny URL will not.

Monitor conversations about your company. Even if you don't join Twitter yourself you can monitor what people are saying about any person, company or brand. This is quite useful from a marketing and PR standpoint. Twitter has a search engine that lets you do just this. For instance, here is a list of everyone who is talking about HubSpot on Twitter. You can subscribe to these searches by RSS to keep yourself updated. Another tip is that you can "follow" all the people you find talking about your company (just click on their username to go to their profile). If they are talking about your company, they would probably be pretty happy that someone from the company wants to follow them.

How to "chat". Using the @ symbol before someone's Twitter username is how people have "conversations" in Twitter. This makes their username a link to their profile so other people can follow the conversation (sort of). For example if you wrote "@mvolpe thanks for the cool blog article about Twitter today" that would be a way of telling me you liked this article. Try it out. It's not IM (instant messaging), but it is sort of like a publicly broadcast IM service.

Engage your CEO in social media. Social media is a great way to have a conversation with your market and make and mange connections with prospects, customers, bloggers and other influencers. But for a CEO, the typical routes to social media can be hard. Especially if you are a larger or global company. A CEO typically has little time to write a blog or answer lots of messages and friend requests on Facebook. I cannot tell you how many CEO blogs I have seen with only 1 or 2 posts because the CEO never had time to update the blog after the first couple entries. But, Twitter is limited to 140 characters per update, so it is all about short thoughts and comments. If your CEO can send a text message, they can use Twitter from anywhere in the world as a marketing and PR tool. Twitter is actually perfect for CEO or founder who is always on the road meeting with people and who has some interesting opinions on your market.

Keep in touch with bloggers / media. It is really easy to follow someone on Twitter (see below). And you'll be surprised how often they decide to follow you as well. In fact, I have lots of people I consider "famous" in the marketing and PR worlds following me. In my opinion, this is a way easier way to connect with influential people in the media than calling and emailing them.

Monitor your company / brand on Twitter. A while back we noticed that Guy Kawasaki mentioned Website Grader on Twitter. Well, of course we had to let him know a bit more about Website Grader and maybe ask if he would also blog about it? The result was this blog article on Website Grader which drove a good amount of traffic and leads. (See below for a cool tip on how to easily monitor people talking about your company on Twitter.)

Announce specials, deals or sales. If you are a retailer or anyone who often has special offers, you can use Twitter to announce these deals instantly to a large audience. You know those commercials from Southwest Airlines about that "Ding" application you could download and would then alert you about specials on flights? Well, Twitter can be used as a kind of free version of that. Dell and Woot have done just this type of marketing, with a lot of success.

Live updates on events or conferences. If you participate in a large trade show or run your own corporate event, you can use Twitter to announce last minute changes, cool events that are happening ("Just announced, David Meerman Scott book signing in the exhibit hall until 11am") and more. It is a great last minute marketing tool.

Promote blog articles, webinars, interesting news and more. Its really easy to post a link to something in Twitter, and I often post links to blog articles on this blog, or other news articles relevant to HubSpot. A good idea is to post articles on other websites that are relevant to your business, like a customer success story or other PR coverage. If you have other content that is appealing to your audience like a free webinar, post links to those too.

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Article Tags: how to use twitter for business, twitter, twitter for business



Related Forum Posts
Re: Ideas For Business - Hello Lucy, you may consider this list for Ideas for Business: (Top 23 list) Rank Company 1 Google 2 Genentech 3 Wegmans Food Markets 4 Container Store 5 Whole Foods Market 6 Network Appliance 7 S.C. Johnson & Son 8 Boston Consulting Grp. 9 Methodist Hospital Sys. 10 W.L. Gore & Associates 11 Cisco Systems 12 David Weekley Homes 13 Nugget Market 14 Qualcomm 15 American Century Invest. 16 Starbucks Coffee 17 Quicken Loans 18 Station Casinos 19 Alston & Bird 20 QuikTrip 21 Griffin Hospital 22 Valero Energy 23 Vision Service Plan
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.
My entry - 1. The Best Business Books Ever: The 100 Most Influential Business Books You'll Never Have Time to Read - this is a fascinating book about the history of Business theory, and I'd recommend it to anybody. 2. The Big Book of Small Business: You Don't Have to Run Your Business by the Seat of Your Pants, by Tom Gegax. Ditto. 3. PADI: The Business of Diving Book Okay, so this book won't be of use to anyone who doesn't want to start a scuba store, but I did, and this book was of course invaluable to me in reaching that goal.
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.
Re: How should i promote a new website? - ignore this message IF it's already been stated. I haven't had a chance to read all the replies and i have to jet from the office... I suggest marketing where ever your Target Market congregates. If it's a forum of concerned parents - go there. Strike up a deal with the forum owner (JV) and have him promote it to the list of members (Integration Marketing). If you want to go with Forums then i would partner with a parent who is a frequent poster/moderator on a particular Target Market Forum and have him/her add your link to their signature. That was just a thought but it's not as intense once you get buy in from the Forum owner or high ranked poster/moderator. Hope that sparks some new ideas.


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