How to Use Twitter to Promote Your Business

Do you tweet? Twitter is a social media marketing tool that has gained a lot of popularity over the last year or so and is being used by thousands to promote their online businesses as well as to keep in touch with friends and family. If you are not yet using Twitter to promote your business then you really should look into it.

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a social media website that allows users to enter short, 140 character updates on their profile page and then others can follow these updates. Your updates can be about just about anything - personal or business - provided that it doesn't break Twitter's terms of service.

What Should You Tweet?

Generally Twitter marketers can make one of two mistakes - either they will only update about personal things and so really miss the opportunity of marketing to their followers or they may just tweet marketing messages and so lose some followers who want something more personal. The ideal is to include a mix of personal, business and generally useful information. This way you can promote your business using Twitter while still keeping a large following.

Building Your List of Followers

Just tweeting is not enough, you need to build as large a list of Twitter followers as possible so that as many people can see your messages as possible. I have found ViralFollowers.com and similar tools to be very useful in this regard and you really need to do very little to get a good following with them. You can also look for people who may be interested in what you have to offer and try following them to see if they follow back (many people do).

Automate Your Tweets and Tweet Regularly

When using Twitter to promote your business you want to tweet regularly so that as many people get to see your tweets as possible and get as much exposure to you as possible. It really helps to do this if you have set up an automated system of tweeting so that you don't need to go into Twitter each time you want to tweet. This can either be set up on your own website using CRON jobs (most web hosts offer a link where you can add CRON jobs i.e. scripts that are run on a regular basis) or else you can use some of the tools available for this purpose such as SocialOomph.com.

Connect Twitter with Your Other Social Networks

Are you using Facebook, LinkedIN, etc? Then connect Twitter to these applications so that you can share information between the different networks. Another good idea is to connect Twitter to your blogs so that each time you post a new blog post it is automatically sent to Twitter.

There are many WordPress plug-ins that allow you to automatically update your Twitter account each time a blog post is released (whether you have pre-scheduled these or are posting them then). Twitter Tools is perhaps the most well-known and popular of these plug-ins for WordPress.

Different social networks also offer different applications, which you can use to connect these accounts. If you use Facebook, look through the application directory for Twitter applications and choose one that you like. Other social networks may ask you for your Twitter details and automatically connect your Twitter account to their network so that it appears on your profile.

Twitter is a social marketing tool that is generally quick and easy to use and can be automated to a large extent to still bring in good results. Make sure you are tweeting a variety of information to keep people interested and promote your business.