Twitter, with its over 200 million active users, is a force to be reckoned with if you want to be serious about marketing on the internet. It might seem like a joke to market your business in 140 characters or less, but successful Twitter markets aren’t laughing – well okay – they are laughing, but all the way to the bank.
You can use Twitter for so many different goals – from building a larger network to conducting research to finding out what the buzz is about your business, company, industry, or what-have-you. The sky is the limit with Twitter in terms of its uses to your business.
To be successful with Twitter it’s important to follow these tips to maximize your results.
1. Know your why – It’s not enough to use Twitter; you need to know why you are on Twitter and what you hope to accomplish. If you want to build a responsive network on Twitter, the tools are right at your fingertips.
2. Create an awesome profile – As with any type of social media, your first impression counts big time. Your profile is your first impression on Twitter. You can create backgrounds, headers, and give as much information as you want. Use keyword-rich information that will speak directly to your target audience for best results.
3. Tweet regularly – With Twitter, it’s important to continue being part of the conversation on a regular basis. Don’t tweet the exact same thing over and over; be creative and tweet using different words several times a day.
4. Retweet – Participate with your community by retweeting things that you think would be valuable to your followers. Not only will you give your followers more compelling content and information, you’ll also ingratiate yourself to others who will repeat the favor.
5. Be retweetable – If your updates are boring and useless, no one is going to want to retweet what you have to say. Be creative with your 140 characters.
6. Interact often – Engage in tweet conversations with others and go through your direct and indirect messages often to ensure that you are answering questions and helping as many people as you can. Under no circumstances should you ever send automatic direct messages to anyone.
7. Follow people – If someone follows you, follow them back. Only delete people if they are spammers or unresponsive for long periods of time. You’ll look fishy (and Twitter doesn’t like it) if you don’t follow people back. Be careful about following too many people at once if they’ve not already followed you.
8. Keep it clean – Yes, keep your language clean but that’s not the point here. What we mean is that you should occasionally clean up who you follow and who is following you. You may have felt someone was a good connection yesterday but tomorrow realize they’re not.
9. Use #hashtags – Hashtags are great ways to organize information on Twitter. By using them you’ll make it easier to search for your tweets or tweets you’ve asked others to share. It’s a great way to keep a conversation going if everyone uses the same hashtags.
10. Track results – In business nothing has worked until you can prove that it works, and that’s not any different for Twitter. Have defined goals that enable you to measure what constitutes success and then choose a way to track that goal in a provable way.
By being a friendly, respectful person who is honest, you will be completely awesome on Twitter. Twitter does not work well for people who lie, use it only to promote themselves, and who don’t pay attention to their target audience. To truly maximize results from Twitter, you have to care about your image, your followers’ image, and practice true engagement.
