Top 10 Best Twitter Marketing Tips

In this article, I want to look at using Twitter as a marketing tool. I will give you my Top 10 Best Twitter Marketing Tips in due course, but first I just wanted to take just a minute to explain to you why Twitter is so important. Twitter is one of the biggest social networking sites in the world. Using Twitter can be marvelous fun and a great way of keeping in touch with friends and family, but from a marketing point of view, it is also one of the most powerful tools available for the promotion of products, people and services. In fact, I would go as far as to say that no modern business can really afford to be without a twitter marketing strategy if they wish to be taken seriously. Twitter can raise the profile of a brand or company, help you to sell products online, provide updates and news to customers, and provide a platform for communicating directly with fans, customers, and potential customers.

Whether using Twitter for business, or pleasure, or just to promote a personal blog, the principles are still the same if you want to maximize its potential. One of the key things that you need to do in order to use Twitter effectively is get Twitter followers. But there is more to it than that. You need lots of followers who are interested in what you have got to tweet. It is no use just getting lots of Twitter followers who are not interested, or Twitter followers who take an interest in your tweets, but are few in number. You need to be aiming for 500+ Twitter followers initially who are interested in your brand, product, person, or service. From there you can gradually build numbers and to some extent it will happen organically. Once you have your twitter account or accounts set up as you want them with a decent amount of followers, you should spend about 10-20 minutes per day to maintain them.

Below are my Top 10 Best Twitter Marketing Tips which will give you a potted guide on how to get Twitter followers who will take an active interest in your tweets and how to use twitter to promote a product, brand, person, or service effectively.

1. Understand what you are marketing and who you are trying to appeal to. With Twitter marketing, as with all marketing, you must have a clear idea of what it is that you are promoting and the sort of audience or customer base that you are trying to appeal to. Ask yourself questions about your target audience. What is their predominant age? Background? Where do they live? What are their interests?

2. This is one my most important Twitter marketing tips. Keep your Twitter marketing focused on your target audience. There is no point getting followers who are not interested in your product or whatever you are marketing. If your target audience is too diverse to focus one, then you may want to consider splitting it into separate niches and creating a separate Twitter account for each specific niche. Creating Twitter accounts is quick and easy (one of the reasons that makes Twitter marketing so great!) and getting followers for them who are suitable is not too difficult, if you are focused on a specific area of interest.

3. Keep your tweets focused on your subject area. If you are promoting a gardening blog, do not throw in tweets about your views on American politics, or your trip to the theatre last night. Try to keep it focused on gardening. If you find yourself wanting to tweet about American politics or theatre trips, start another, separate Twitter account.

4. One simple way to get followers is to promote yourself to followers of another twitter profile in a similar vein to your own, as they are the likely to be the same sort of Twitter users that you wish to target. The standard way to promote yourself in Twitter is just to follow someone (you could mail or message them, but that would be considered too intrusive by some people, plus clicking to follow people is quick and easy). You can easily click to follow hundreds of people this way in a relatively short period of time.

5. However, if you follow lots of Twitter users regularly, you will hit problems at some point. Many people that you follow, won’t follow you back and Twitter doesn’t like your ratio of Twitter follows to Twitter followers too far out of kilter. This normally kicks in at around 2000 Twitter follows. You will have to prune away some of the people that you follow but don’t follow you back. There used to be programs that did this for you en masse, but Twitter put a stop to that, so you will have to do it manually, which is tedious, but there are programs such as Twitter Karma to help you.

6. Another one of my Twitter marketing tips. Keep engaged with your followers but don’t get carried away. From time to time, people will message you. It is good to reply and communicate with your followers. Be wary of doing too much chatting, however. Remember that you are here primarily to market your product etc. and that means mainly getting relevant followers and tweeting your product. Having said all that, sometimes you can get some great personal contacts via Twitter. I have had articles and blogs featured in online magazines through contacts I have made through Twitter.

7. Write engaging titles for your links. Remember that you want people to retweet your tweets, and then others to retweet the retweets, so try to make your tweets sound as interesting as possible. (It helps if they lead Twitter users to engaging information and products too, of course!)

8. Make sure that your Twitter profile will appeal to your audience. It is the first thing that many people are going to see when they check you out in Twitter, so you need to give out a strong and positive image. Speaking of images, I would always recommend uploading an image to your Twitter profile, using the default image just looks lazy and bad.

9. Generally speaking, I would always follow back people who follow you, as it is another way of getting your name out there, even if it isn’t maybe quite as targeted as you’d like. Some Twitter users consider following back Twitter followers to be the correct Twitter etiquette, but it is also just good Twitter marketing.

10. Don’t tweet too much. Even if you have software that is capable of automatically tweeting your product once every minute 24/7, it is not generally wise to do so, in my experience. You should bear in mind that you will alienate your followers if you bombard them with tweets. Remember it is the real people who are following you that the most important Twitter followers, not the hundred of other people, or increasingly 'bots', marketing themselves out there, who will follow you but not read or click on your tweets!