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.

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19 comments

jetscyber April 7, 2011 - 10:28 pm
Twitter is a great place to get your business or website out to people. That is as long as you have plenty of followers.
ZK@Web Marketing Tips April 8, 2011 - 2:58 am
If you are new to Twitter, I suggest you start with the above tips to build a following. Once you have a following, it works well to market your services or products.
Alexis April 8, 2011 - 9:20 am
I've not yet been successful using twitter.I use Social Oomph but it deosn't seem to bring me any good result in terms of sales or leads.
Alex April 8, 2011 - 11:46 am
It's pretty hard for any small business to have people following them, mainly because they don't know about them. So for any business, the best start in my opinion would be to try and get the word out about their new twitter account and get the ball rolling by using hash tags, following people who are in your business or tweet about your topic (now, I don't know about competing business, you could follow them, but the best choice is to try and steal their audience).
Best watches for men April 8, 2011 - 12:06 pm
Twitter is a great way to create an online presence for your business. It is best used as a means to establish a genuine relationship with your potential clients not as a front end for your sales funnel where you only bombard your followers with your offers and products. Steve
Sarah Harris April 8, 2011 - 1:28 pm
These are some good first tips for Twitter. I must admit, when I first joined it was all a little daunting. But once you get the swing of it, and your follower list fills up, it becomes quite fun! And it really is such a great way to inform others about your business, what's new, promotions, etc.
Chi Pritchard April 9, 2011 - 10:03 am
Twitter has actually helped me alot. I've gotten quite a few clients just based on some of the posts on twitter. I use it to direct those who may be interested in scheduling a session with me!!
Johanna @ GIJoh.com April 10, 2011 - 2:01 am
Hi Lolita, This will surely be helpful for me as well as others who are just starting up on Twitter on promoting their sites. Glad I've read this. Thanks!
Samantha Dermot April 10, 2011 - 1:51 pm
No one in this world nowadays can deny that social networking sites help any kind of small business a lot. It is not for the small businesses only. Some of the biggest company updates their upcoming products or offers in those social networking sites. Twitter is surely one of the best places where you can catch many eyeballs for your product. So it is surely a great article to go through as you can find out those valuable tips for marketing your products.
Delena Silverfox April 10, 2011 - 5:51 pm
Well-said, Lolita! Twitter is an absolutely fantastic tool, and whether you use TweetDeck, HootSuite, or another interface to manage your account (both of them are fantastic), it just makes your job that much easier. One thing I did to experiment with its effectiveness was to do nothing on Twitter for 7 days except to ReTweet other people's stuff I thought was good, to give people @ mentions who followed me or whom I followed, and to give the (very) occasional Reply if I felt it was warranted. I didn't Tweet ANY of my own material for a solid week. My results were astounding, and all of my numbers climbed higher in that one week than in the entire rest of the time I'd been using Twitter. Needless to say, I continue using that method now, and Tweet my own material rarely. But when I do, it gets massive results! Delena
HackTik April 13, 2011 - 4:04 am
Nice post. However, one must ensure you don't go over tweet as your business promotion efforts because that may bring more negative than positive results to your efforts.
Usman@FirstHosting April 13, 2011 - 5:22 am
I love to have proper conversation on twitter, instead of having some free online tools to spam our twitter accounts. Incase if some one is doing decent activity I love to take part and follow, that simply depends on their usage, but for sure twitter can get success.
Entrepreneur Training April 14, 2011 - 10:46 am
Twitter is undoubtedly a great tool that can be effectively used for marketing purposes. That's why it is extremely important to select the right advertising strategy in Twitter. The main advantages of Twitter are considered to be incoming links, regular traffic and brand development!
Matt April 20, 2011 - 7:32 am
Yes Twitter is a great tool for networking. I've found it's also really good for getting in touch with people who share your interests and live in the same city. If you're in a decent sized place and you just search for the name of it (on its own or with the hash tag attached) you'll find numerous residents of the place. This is good for business people for obvious reasons, particularly if they own a bricks and mortar business.
Debra April 22, 2011 - 2:25 am
Twitter is very good for getting in touch with people but it also very good for SEO. After posting URLs on twitter these pages will be indexed by google very fast.
Kavya Hari April 23, 2011 - 3:44 am
Every one said that twitter is good. So, i have to try out now :)
Jerrick April 27, 2011 - 11:19 pm
twitter is a nice portal to interact with customers and interact with them . Also is a place to split out your promotion to market. But what i get is our active user drop terrible and facebook active user increase. But i still use both of it.
hcg drop August 17, 2011 - 11:00 am
Some of the most popular services include Internet marketing through social networks, blogging, and article marketing; website and graphic design; search engine optimization support.
hcgdrops August 20, 2011 - 9:46 am
Twitter can be useful for businesses in many ways and business owners must have a clear idea of what they hope to achieve from their Twitter profile and how they will do it.
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