7 Tips For Growing Your Business With Twitter

Published By Martin Aranovitch

Twitter is a free social networking site that is taking the online world by storm. Everybody’s talking about Twitter nowadays. At it’s most basic, Twitter is an online subscription service for text messages, but it can do so much more, especially for helping you grow your business ...

Twitter is a free social networking site that is taking the online world by storm. Everybody’s talking about Twitter nowadays.  You can’t get through a newscast these days without somebody mentioning Twitter or Tweets.  Even Barack Obama tweets.  But what exactly is this new social marketing tool, and how can you use it to grow your business?

What Is Twitter?

At it’s most basic, it's a type of online subscription service for text messages, but it can do so much more, especially for helping you grow your business.

Twitter is a tool that allows users to send instant messages and to social network via short messages, also known as micro-blogs.

Users can create Twitter messages (up to 140 characters in length), more commonly called tweets, through their Twitter pages, IMs, Facebook accounts, emails, SMS text messages from their mobile phones and third-party applications . It also has a handy feature which allows you to send direct (private) messages to your friends on Twitter.

Twitter gives you the ability to think at the speed of the Internet. Any bleeding edge thing you're working on, you'll find someone doing something similar.

Using Twitter To Grow Your Business - 7 Tips

Twitter is like a blog on a microscopic scale, hence the term “micro-blogging”. Instead of writing whole posts and notifying your mailing list  whenever a new post gets published, a tweet (what a Twitter post is called) can be a maximum of 140 characters only, and the people who are following you get your whole tweet at once, instead of having to go to your website.

What started out as --- has now become a huge phenomenon.  Companies like Apple, Intel, H&R Block and Zappos all have a presence on Twitter.  As mentioned earlier, so is the new President of the United States. 

So how can you leverage this zeitgeist for growing your business?

First of all, you need to get up and running on Twitter, ASAP. 

Once you register your Twitter account, the next step is to start building your list of followers. While this may sound like you have just joined a “cult”, don’t worry … it simply refers to the process of building a list of people that want to receive your tweets and be kept informed about your business, much like building a mailing list for your web site or blog.

Okay … now that you have your Twitter account, just follow the checklist below and you will be well on your way to growing your business exposure online using this amazing new tool:

1) Import Your Contacts

When you sign up for Twitter, make sure to import all of your contacts from Gmail, Hotmail, your address book and your mailing list.

2) Write Your Profile

Make sure that you complete your profile, as this makes it easier for people to find you, and use the same keywords in your profile that you do on your website.  Always include a link to your website (including the “http” to ensure that it’s clickable) – after all, you’re trying to build your business.  You can also personalize the colors and the sidebar of your profile page. 

3) Understand How Twitter Works

Twitter is not another marketing tool that you can manipulate and abuse. It is a social marketing tool that will only be useful to you if you actually become part of the Twitter community.  Don’t spam, and don’t actively promote yourself. 

Build a standing in the community by replying to other tweets (retweeting), share cool stuff and build trust, then direct your followers to a blog post, filled with useful information, and only then use that post to get followers to take action.  Trying to take people out of Twitter right away and into a sales pitch will get you labeled as a spammer, a scammer or both.

4) Build Up Your Audience

To build your audience above and beyond your initial contact list, you’ll need to look both inside and outside Twitter.

Outside of Twitter, you can put a link to “Follow me on Twitter” in your email signature, forum signature, website, blog posts, and any other way that you communicate with people (post only where appropriate, of course – you may not want the IRS to follow you on Twitter.)

Inside of Twitter, it’s really all about following people.  You can find other users that you admire, and see who is following them; you can also see who is following your friends; use Twitter directories to find members who are likely to follow you; use the search feature to find profiles of people you want to follow – and follow all of them.  They will, in turn, follow you.

5) Watch How Much You’re Following

While you’re building your following, you still need to maintain a balance between people you follow and people that follow you.  Start following too many people and you’ll be seen as a spammer; don’t follow enough, and you may look elitist.  I recommend you grow slowly. Don’t add 500 new friends in one day.  Add 50 at a time and give them time to start following you, so you can maintain a balanced and sustainable approach.

You can also use a tool like “Friend or Follow” to balance out your lists. This tool will tell you who is following you that you’re not following yet, and vice-versa.  It will also let you keep track of those who follow you. Keep in mind that if you follow them and then they stop following you, they’re most likely spammers, so don’t use this tactic or you’ll get the same reputation.

6) Become A Business Worth Following

Be witty, and post useful information.  If you’ve got a niche, make sure that you’re talking to them.  If you have news, tweet it.  You can also use the tools on Twitter to take your blog posts and automatically tweet them. 

You can tell people what you do. Remember to always be upfront with people.  You just have to avoid the obvious sell, people can see that coming from a mile away.  You can promote your business and celebrate your victories (e.g. XXX is happy to get the YYY account!), but don’t try to sell anyone anything (Get all of your advertising solutions here!).

7) Follow Wisely

In this context, ‘follow’ has a broader meaning.  Look to the experts in your category who are also on Twitter and learn from them.  Find 10 to 20 users you admire that have more than 300 followers and try to learn how they did it.  Take their ideas and adapt them for your own purposes.

Some Interesting Facts About Twitter

TwitDir, a Twitter directory, suggests there are now 1.05 million Twitter users - up from 518,000 last year. Twitter is mainstream and lots of time and energy is being spent analyzing and judging Twitter habits. Yes, some folks have huge numbers of followers, whereas others have 12.

Twitter's median age is 31, while Facebook's is 26 and MySpace's is 27. Because of their youth, however, Twitter users are more likely to come from lower-income households (older Internet users tend to make more than younger users), and they're more likely to live in urban areas than the general Internet population.

Twitter Tools

There are certain tools and applications that can help you manage your information better. For example:

Twitter Submitter works on any browser, any computer system. It allows you to post updates to your Twitter blog.

Twitter Digest lets you read Twitter updates in a more manageable fashion. Just pick the usernames you'd like to generate a digest for, and you will see all updates made by them during the past full day (GMT).

Additional Twitter Tips

Twitter and other social media can substitute for -- but not completely displace -- the need for face-to-face meetings. There are certain things that can only happen in the face-to-face space, so it’s important to keep this in mind.

Keep in mind also, that Twitter has become a popular pastime for many who like to update their daily thoughts and activities, as well as for the voyeurs who just enjoy reading the tweets, so as you start using Twitter more and more, don’t fall into the trap of using it in unproductive ways. Stay focused on your goals and use Twitter as a business tool.

Also, if you already have a business blog and are wondering how the two different Social media platforms compare, or how to integrate both to gain maximum benefit from using the new technologies, then Twitter provides a platform for banter that blogging doesn't.

Twitter is also accessible in so many places via IM, mobile text messaging, or the World Wide Web in general, that it has induced a different sort of behavior among online users. Twitter encourages people to adapt and invent behavior to suit their needs, so use Twitter wisely and creatively when adapting it for business use.

I hope you have found this information useful. If you’re interested in learning more about ways to grow a business using Social Media, Social Networking Sites and Web 2.0 technologies, I recommend you take a look at what Portal Feeder has to offer. Portal Feeder is an exclusive online community for web business builders. (Note: if the doors are closed to new members when you visit, just make sure to sign up to their priority notification list so you can be informed as soon as their doors re-open).

Also, if you are interested in growing your business with your own social networking site, download the FREE report “How To Profit With Your Own Social Networking Site”, which explains how to grow a database of targeted customers for your own business by creating your own social networking site.

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About:

Martin Aranovitch is a successful SME (small to medium enterprise) business coach, sales trainer and web business entrepreneur. He has built several profitable online businesses, including www.AudioBookOne.net ,a downloadable audio book store containing thousands of best-selling audio book titles from the world's leading audio book publishers.

Source: http://www.portalfeederpro.com

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