How to use Twitter as part of your marketing strategy

Twitter marketing can be an effective way to increase the scope of your business while gaining new customers along the way. The volume of information flowing through Twitter can be overwhelming, but there are ways to embrace it and join the conversation. Many people and groups, large and small, use Twitter to share valuable news and tips to influence change.

If you aren’t leveraging Twitter’s potential for improving your sales, you are missing out on a great opportunity to grow your business.

One of the ways companies and causes can work together is through the use of Twitter. Twitter can be an invaluable tool for promoting your cause marketing program. Here are some things to like about Twitter for cause marketing

Twitter is commonly used as a quick and easy way to microblog in 140 characters or less about the goings-on of one’s personal life. More and more businesses and organizations, however, are coming up with creative ways to use Twitter for effective online

Twitter marketing strategies you should be using now.

1. Get on Twitter – setup an account with a name that makes sense, is easy to spell and matches the name of your organization, business or services. If someone is already using your name then you have to get creative and come up with an alternative spelling or add a dash between two words etc.

2. Create a Twitter Marketing Strategy – Figure out how you can best use Twitter to your advantage and come up with a plan for how you’ll roll out your strategy including how you’ll get followers, the types of people/companies you’ll follow, posting frequency, posting content type, landing pages, on and offline promotion, etc.

3. Promotional Tweets - By using Twitter as your company’s personal marketing channel, you can help increase traffic levels to your blog or website. For example, you can post links on Twitter to pages on your website, such as press releases, blog posts, new product arrivals and the like, thereby drumming up additional business and highlighting important news.

However, it’s important that you don’t use Twitter as only a self-promoting tool. Instead, space out your promotional tweets with personalized, one-on-one conversations with your followers.

By combining your promotional tweets with interactive tweets with customers, you’ll be able to harness the power of Twitter as a marketing tool without turning people off to your company by seeming too self-serving. Plus, consumers enjoy seeing the “behind the scenes” working of a company, because it allows them to connect with your business on a personal level.

4. Setup Twitter Landing Pages on your company or organization’s website to optimize conversions when you drive people from your twitter page to your website.

5. Promote Your Twitter Address on your company or organization’s website, facebook page, in your email signature, etc. Even consider having your tweets publish directly to a section of your website or have your website blog posts publish directly to your Twitter account

6 Follow your Target Market

To use Twitter effectively as a marketing tool, it’s important to follow those who are a part of your target market. Simply following anyone and everyone in the hopes they’ll follow you back is absolutely useless if the content you provide isn’t relevant to them.

With that being said, track down your target market on Twitter and follow those people. Of course, you can’t just follow them and ignore them. Instead, actively follow them by commenting on their tweets, follow their conversations and encourage them to share their thoughts and opinions with you.

You can also follow those who are talking about your company, and make sure to leave a thank you if you’re receiving a lot of positive buzz. This will help you use Twitter as a successful marketing tool and build relationships with your potential customer base.

7. Use Keywords

Make a list of keywords that best describe your business and/or industry. Then, every time you sit down to compose a tweet, make sure to use some of the keywords you’ve listed in your tweet so people can find you easily.

This doesn’t mean you should cram each and every tweet full of keywords that don’t make sense; you still want your tweet to be readable and relevant. With that being said, make sure every tweet you do write count. Keywords are an important way to drive traffic, and if you want to share your useful content with your Twitter audience you need to make sure you are using keywords that relate to what you are promoting.

8. Tweet Regularly

As with any other marketing strategy, you need to make sure you are regularly putting your name out there and connecting with your target audience. However, you want to avoid bombarding your followers with too many tweets – that’s a quick way to ensure the loss of followers, i.e., potential customers.

As I mentioned above, you want to make sure each tweet counts. So, while you want to tweet regularly, make sure what you are tweeting is actually of interest to the people you’re trying to connect with.