Twitter Marketing – Using Twitter to Promote Your Business

							 Twitter Marketing –
   Using Twitter to
Promote Your Business

                             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
                             8k 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.

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.