Tweet Yourself to Business Success

Sales and marketing are two important tools that go hand-in-hand for any business. Some of the traditional ways to get exposure for your business include trade show giveaways, event sponsoring, and even local press releases. While all of these methods can attract potential customers, there are newer ways to grow sales and jumpstart your marketing efforts in the 21st century. One of these ways is through a social networking site called Twitter

Though you may have heard about Twitter, you may not be quite sure about whether it’s appropriate to be advertising or marketing your business on it. You might not even know how it works. Well, the fact of the matter is that you can essentially “tweet” yourself to business success by engaging your audience and building relationships with them. As you do this, you’ll develop “followers,” consisting of other Twitter members that care about what your company has to say.

Create an Account and Listen

Perhaps the first step in using Twitter to grow your business is to create an account. It is actually quite simple to do this. All you must do is go to the website, select the option to create an account and upload an appropriate photo as representation for your company or business. Once you get on the website and have an established profile, an important step to take would be to “listen” to the Twitterverse before diving in.

You can listen by using Twitter’s own tools as well as third-party tools to tune into micro-conversations about your own company or the trends in which your business is involved. For example, you can use Twitter’s search function to find if people are already tweeting about your company or the questions people are asking about a certain topic.

Twitter tools like Social Oomph can help you find trends or conversations which may be beneficial for your business to join. You can also use Twitter Search to drill down to find consumers who live in your area, which is especially helpful if you’re a local business and would like to reach people in a specific city or region.

Trust and Relationship Building

One of the ways you can convey trust and build a relationship is to add value between you and your Twitter followers. This is especially important if your business is new to Twitter as you don’t want to start out too sales-like or seem spammy. Instead, you should communicate ideas about a certain topic, offer advice or solicit ideas or opinions from the Twittersphere. Essentially, your goal should be to share your expertise so that you can build credibility with potential customers and anyone else that’s listening and keeping up with what you have to say.

Combine Social Media

Communicating with your Twitter followers is a good thing, but you need to take your efforts to a higher level by combining Twitter with your other social media accounts so you can take full advantage and get even more exposure. You can connect Facebook with Twitter and add both of these accounts to your company website, which essentially allows you to filter your traffic and influence where you want your customers to go.

Once you combine your social media and social networking efforts, you’ll be speaking and tweeting to a wider audience. Everyone in your circle of “friends” will be able to see when you post or Tweet about upcoming giveaways, promotional products, and events that you schedule.

Though Twitter may not result in direct sales to your consumers, it establishes the business and customer relationship necessary to get the ball rolling. The rapport you build with people while using Twitter goes a long way to creating the loyal customers you need to have a successful business, company image and reputation.

This is a guest post by Lolita Sanchez, if you want to guest post on this blog check out the guidelines.

Image Credit: Bendodson.