For those of you who have not hear of Twitter before here is a short explanation of what it is. Twitter is a privately funded startup company that was started as a side project in March 2006 in the neighborhood of San Francisco, CA. Twitter is a real-time short messaging service that works on multiple networks and devices. It is used to update people on friends day-to-day activities, world news, and even for businesses. So now that you know what it is you may be thinking to yourself how is it really useful for business? Below are a few ways I have found it to be helpful for my blog.
1. Create an account. Use the search feature of Twitter to see what your competitors are doing and read and learn from them.
2. Add a picture of your company/logo or yourself. People like to see who you are and that way they can relate to you a bit more easily.
3. Talk to other people on Twitter. Even if it doesn’t help your business it shows you are human and are interested.
4. Point out interesting topics on your space and don’t just put things about yourself.
5. Share links to interesting places / websites / blogs.
6. Be careful about always promoting your own stuff. Your fans will like it but not everyone else will.
7. Talk about things that are not business related as well.
8. Try to answer questions like “What has your attention?” instead of “What are you doing?”
9. When promoting a blog post, ask a question or explain what’s coming next, instead of just dumping a link. (this point is in bold because its very important for marketing your blog on Twitter)
10. Ask questions. Twitter is great for getting opinions.
11. Tweet about other people’s stuff. This doesn’t directly help your business but show you care about others.
12. When you DO talk about your stuff make sure it is useful.
13. Don’t toot your own horn too much. (I know sometimes I do this but try to stay away from it some of the time if you can)
14. You don’t have to read every tweet.
15. Commenting on others’ tweets, and retweeting what others have posted is a great way to build community.
16. Twitter helps with business development, if your prospects are online (like my blog readers)
17. Remember that Twitter doesnt’ replace direct email marketing.
18. Twitter works well as an opinion poll.
19. Have favorites. When you are new to Twitter you may not have noticed but there are little star icon next to each tweet. Watch what new followers favor and build off of that.
20. Avoid spammer stats. Its not good to see that you have 3 followers and follow 150 people. If you do this it shows that you haven’t revealed anything about yourself and in turn makes it so that people are unlikely to follow you in return.
September 22nd, 2008 at 10:27 pm
Hi there,
I looked over your blog and it looks really good. Do you ever do link exchanges on your blog roll? If you do, I’d like to exchange links with you.
Let me know if you’re interested.
Thanks..
September 22nd, 2008 at 11:59 pm
Sure thing. I will add a link to my blog in my Feature Links section at the bottom right of my blog. Please add a link back to my blog on your website.
Thanks!