Twitter Marketing for Businesses

By now you would know what Twitter is and you probably have an account in it too. But, do you use that effectively for your business and personal brand? If you are a typical user, the answer would be no. Most users are quite uncomfortable writing their thoughts in 140 characters and a sufficient majority tweet just crap of the type “I’m eating pizzas for dinner”. However, rightly using Twitter can provide you visibility in a platform that is used by everyone from President Obama to Bill Gates to your local TV news anchors. In this post I will walk you through the tips for effectively using Twitter for marketing your business.

1. Carefully complete your Twitter bio and picture in a professional way. Most times newbie users ignore writing a decent bio and this puts off your potential followers. Don’t try to be over creative with your CAPS and emoticons, and write a simple bio encapsulating what you do and a profile pic of your account manager or the company logo. Don’t forget to link to your company website that helps in your SEO and visibility.
2. Tweet regularly. Allocate 10 minutes everyday to collect interesting links and thoughts you come across and schedule the tweets to appear throughout the day using an app like Buffer. Make them informative and not promotional.
3. Use a good app to manage tweets. Managing Twitter is a pain and Twitter’s web app sucks. Managing 100s of tweets from whom you follow is cumbersome. An app like Hootsuite in PC or Flipboard in iPad are great to manage your feeds.
4. Show the human behind the business: Many people managing their company accounts forget that their company is made of humans; they just tweet in a bland corporate fashion. Use Twitter to give the backstage view and the bloopers that show the human side of your company. Maybe today is your party time; tweet about it. Just be cautious to not overdo this and stay within ethical limits.
5. Promote yourself sparingly: Don’t let every tweet from you be an ad or a promotion. A rule of thumb is to have one promotional tweet for every 10 informational tweets. Think of it like the advertisement slot that appear in between news broadcasts.
6. Follow influential people in your target area and your profession. Try to engage them in conversations when they tweet something relevant to what you do or what you know. If you converse intelligently they will follow you.
7. Use your Twitter credentials to login and comment in blogs posts that are related to what you do. If you comment intelligently other blog visitors will follow you.
8. Retweet and appreciate for other user’s good tweets. People like to get flattered and when you flatter them appropriately you get their attention.
9. Hold contests and polls with rewards. Motivate your followers and potential customers to engage with you. Have contests with rewards periodically to pep up interest to your account.