If you aren’t leveraging Twitter’s potential for improving your sales, you are missing out on a great opportunity to grow your business.
While Twitter doesn’t seem like an obvious marketing choice at first glance given their 140 character limit, businesses that can harness their creativity and be a little inventive will find that marketing on Twitter has big benefits.
Here are 5 Twitter marketing strategies you should be using now.
1. Promotional Tweets
By using Twitter as your company’s personal marketing channel, you can help increase traffic levels to your blog or website. For example, you can post links on Twitter to pages on your website, such as press releases, blog posts, new product arrivals and the like, thereby drumming up additional business and highlighting important news.
However, it’s important that you don’t use Twitter as only a self-promoting tool. Instead, space out your promotional tweets with personalized, one-on-one conversations with your followers.
By combining your promotional tweets with interactive tweets with customers, you’ll be able to harness the power of Twitter as a marketing tool without turning people off to your company by seeming too self-serving. Plus, consumers enjoy seeing the “behind the scenes” working of a company, because it allows them to connect with your business on a personal level.
2. Employee Tweets
Consumers like to know there are real people behind a company, so allowing your employees to engage in actively promoting your company and interacting with customers via Twitter is a vital marketing strategy.
By allowing your employees to tweet, you are not only helping build your brand but enabling more customer interaction. When your employees share personal facts about what’s going on behind the scenes, your customers (and potential customers) are going to get a positive feeling about your business as a whole.
3. Follow your Target Market
To use Twitter effectively as a marketing tool, it’s important to follow those who are a part of your target market. Simply following anyone and everyone in the hopes they’ll follow you back is absolutely useless if the content you provide isn’t relevant to them.
With that being said, track down your target market on Twitter and follow those people. Of course, you can’t just follow them and ignore them. Instead, actively follow them by commenting on their tweets, follow their conversations and encourage them to share their thoughts and opinions with you.
You can also follow those who are talking about your company, and make sure to leave a thank you if you’re receiving a lot of positive buzz. This will help you use Twitter as a successful marketing tool and build relationships with your potential customer base.
4. Use Keywords
Make a list of keywords that best describe your business and/or industry. Then, every time you sit down to compose a tweet, make sure to use some of the keywords you’ve listed in your tweet so people can find you easily.
This doesn’t mean you should cram each and every tweet full of keywords that don’t make sense; you still want your tweet to be readable and relevant. With that being said, make sure every tweet you do write count. Keywords are an important way to drive traffic, and if you want to share your useful content with your Twitter audience you need to make sure you are using keywords that relate to what you are promoting.
5. Tweet Regularly
As with any other marketing strategy, you need to make sure you are regularly putting your name out there and connecting with your target audience. However, you want to avoid bombarding your followers with too many tweets – that’s a quick way to ensure the loss of followers, i.e., potential customers.
As I mentioned above, you want to make sure each tweet counts. So, while you want to tweet regularly, make sure what you are tweeting is actually of interest to the people you’re trying to connect with.
How are YOU doing with these strategies?
Twitter marketing can be an effective way to increase the scope of your business while gaining new customers along the way. While many businesses avoid using Twitter as a marketing tool, these five Twitter marketing strategies are key to helping your business be as successful as possible.
Sound off in the comments below, and discuss how you or your company is using Twitter for your business. Have you seen any of the Twitter marketing strategies above more/less successful?
I need to hone my twitter skills more. I haven’t been able to make the “quality tweets” leap just yet. I use it, but not effectively. Thanks for the post.
You betcha Charles. I’d be willing to be that if you spent a week or two being diligent with scheduling tweets, finding good content to tweet, etc you might gain some followers.
I’m going to give it a shot. Thanks for the advice.
Thanks for the great post Brian and reminder about some of these strategies. I especially agree with the balance of promotional tweets and interaction with followers. I think most people tune out from those who just tweet their own links all day and all night, they might be great links but it has to be balanced.
One Twitter strategy I think is really under used is Twitter search. Local plumbers could search for “leaks” and “pipes” within ten miles of their town or city and find people tweeting about incidents that they could engage with and offer to help – “Hi Mr B, sorry to read your tweet about the burst pipe, I’m only 5 miles away, do you want me to come and take care of it quickly for you?”.
Hello Brian, nice post and good info. Buffer http://bufferapp.com/ is a great tools to help you keep up with the social stream and still give you time to do other productive projects as well. I have been using it for about two weeks now and I got to tell you I love it. There is a FREE version and paid one also if anyone is interested…….I will be publishing a blog post in a few about how this service works….Enjoy guys…
I’m a big fan of BufferApp. Use is with Google Reader and curating quality content becomes a snap.
In my experience that’s a huge cornerstone of any successful Twitter marketing strategy.
Think I’m using most of those strategies and getting reasonable results for both sales and followers.
I think that it’s important not to rush out and follow everyone in the hope that they will follow back.
I tend to follow people who have roughly equal numbers of followers and people they are following.
I don’t follow people who don’t have many followers, but are following thousands, or those who only have a few tweets.
I also follow the occasional superstar… such as yourself Brian. LOL
I love Twitter! I love that it can be a lot of fun while you are building up traffic to your blog. Right now I use Tweetdeck but not too happy about some of the changes they just made to it. If I want to see my new followers I have to log into Twitter myself.
It is hard to follow so many people and still be able to contribute something meaningful too any of the millions of convos out there.
The idea of a peak behind the scenes really resonates with me. Thanks for the tips.
@Brian do you recommend promotional tweets personally? I read on few blogs that don’t go for promotional tweets or promotional posts where you have to pay $$.
Organic traffic or promotion is what everybody recommend.
I don’t, nor ever will, use promotional tweets. I guess it’s a form of advertising, but in my experience it annoys people more than it does good.
You are right…
When I was in, say, my tenth month of classes at college I was made to open a twitter account. I won’t lie and say that I ever really used it. To be honest, I was probably the most vocal opponent of twitter :/
For college, well, I was pretty much right. It was a waste of time, and it did nothing but give the obnoxious kids in our class a reason to think their lives were worth following.
That said…
For the past two years I have been working in the marketing game, and I finally see the advantage to twitter. We’ve been able to work wonders for our clients between using twitter, facebook, and so on. Really, I feel a little ashamed for taking twitter at strictly face value.
Brian – noticed your conversation with Yoast re affiliate spam over on twitter.
What exactly constitutes affiliate spam on twitter?
Have a few questions. Is it possible to email you? TY
Go ahead and use the contact form I have here on my website.
thanks for the info…i’m trying to learn twitter….do the keywords have to be hash-tagged to work in the searches?
No they do not – the hash-tags only make them linkable.