With so many social communities online, it is easy to see why Internet Marketers with limited time have been drawn to the simplistic interface and speediness of the ever-growing community called Twitter.
Twitter is an online social community that allows you to broadcast short messages and updates to those on your list, referred to as ‘followers’. Each time you broadcast a message, everyone who is following you receives your updates.
Twitter is a very simple network to get involved in, even if you have been unsuccessful with other social networking websites in the past.
In fact, one of the most common questions I’ve received from those considering building a twitter marketing campaign is, “what is so different about twitter?”.
In truth, on first glance, twitter appears to be very basic compared to many other microblogging communities. In fact, it’s simplistic interface might actually give the impression that it’s functionality and features are quite limiting.
But Twitter is not only the most popular microblogging network, it carries a buzz that few other social marketplaces can rival. In fact, due to twitters popularity and sudden growth, dozens of other replicated communities have popped up, vying for their place in the social marketing scene.
Few have managed to establish themselves as even a viable option and even fewer have been able to generate enough interest to stay online.
For whatever reason, twitter is the most powerful, active and established microblogging network available at this time, and if you aren’t exploiting its popularity to build or further your business, you’re missing the boat.
Just by focusing on building a relevant, targeted followers base, and staying consistently active within the twitter community, you can easily build email lists, pre-launch products, promote affiliate products and even conduct all of your market research faster and easier than any other method online.
Twitter offers an incredible method of directly connecting to your prospective buyers. You can channel traffic to any website you wish, and even if you are brand new to online business and have yet to establish an online presence, twitter is an exceptional tool to help you develop credibility in your market, and develop your brand.
Twitter has proven to be a solid network that continues to grow each day. It’s addictive, it’s fun and it’s a fantastic way to tap into your niche markets, find out what people are actively looking to purchase, and even keep a pulse on what your competition is up to.
This guide showcases the different strategies that successful marketers have used to drive fresh traffic to their websites, build their email campaigns and dive into new markets, all from within the twitter community.
From a personal perspective as someone who failed to see the value in spending my time marketing within other social communities in the past, twitter has broadened my horizons by providing me with an opportunity to expand my outreach without having to spend hours of my time within the community.
It’s helped connect me to my buyers, build relationships with my customer base and is even responsible for connecting me with over 17 joint venture partnerships in the last six months alone. It’s an exceptionally powerful tool that can enhance and expand your business tremendously, even if you have limited time to dedicate to your twitter presence.
In fact there are tools available that will help you automate the entire process, so that you can continue to focus on building your online business.
Building Your Business With Twitter
The first thing you should do as a new twitter user is to set up your profile, so that those visiting your page see that you are active within the community and are far more likely to follow you.
One of the biggest mistakes that new twitter marketers make is in immediately adding contacts to their following list, without having issued out tweets, updated their profile or uploaded a photo of themselves.
This makes sense if you already have an online presence and are simply incorporating your current contacts from your address book or mailing list, but if you are currently working to establish your brand or grow your business, it’s critical that you develop your twitter presence first, and then add or invite new followers.
This begins with your profile page, the entry point that every potential follower visits prior to adding you as a contact. You need to make sure that you complete your profile and that you provide useful information about yourself so that people can either identify you, or at the very least, know what you are offering, are involved in or are interested in.
There are a few different fields relating to your profile that should never be left out, including your full name and your website URL.
Since your username becomes part of your twitter profile’s URL, you should also make sure that you use a username that is relevant to your market, niche or represents your business.
You can choose to use your name, if it’s available for registration, your website URL, business name or simply keywords representing the market you are involved in. Personally, I recommend that if at all possible, use your full name as your twitter username, so that your profile URL is structured like this:
http://twitter.com/your-name(business name)
One thing that a lot of people don’t know is that the keywords featured within your actual twitter profile URL tie directly in with twitters built in search utility, meaning that whenever someone searches for information using specific keywords, twitter searches through profiles and usernames to pull relevant search results.
This means that you should always include your primary keywords within your profile fields, including your bio area, so that you are far more likely to be included in search results each time someone enters in a relevant keyword associated with your market.
It’s important to determine what brand you are creating on twitter. If you run multiple websites or businesses, use different names (pen names) or business names, you will need to consider the best approach to take.
Do you want to create a single twitter account that serves as an all-in-one contact center for your different markets, or is it better to create multiple twitter accounts, each one focusing on your different businesses and markets? Even with twitter’s simplistic structure, and the vast amount of tools that are available to help automate your activity and in building a following, you’ll still need to spend time actively participating within the twitter community, if you want to further your business and maximize your exposure.
This can be exceptionally difficult to do if you are running and managing multiple twitter accounts, so take that into consideration when you are developing your twitter account and choosing your main focus.
From personal experience, I find that by separating my tweets and activity for each of my main markets helps keep things organized and on track.
I manage four different twitter accounts, each serving a different community base, covering mainstream internet marketing to micro niche subjects.
Since the topics I cover are so different, the only way to successfully market my services via twitter, was to create multiple accounts that run independently from each other.
This also allows me to send out multiple tweets (messages) for each of my markets, rather than confusing potential buyers by using one account that randomly broadcasts messages covering multiple niches.
Twitter has absolutely no problem with people opening up multiple accounts, however you must actively use these accounts in order to keep them.
If you allow an account to go dormant and un-used for a period of time, twitter reserves the right to terminate the account and open up the possibility of someone else registering that username, so if you do intend on creating multiple twitter accounts, make sure that you log in regularly to keep them active.
From within your twitter account, you will be able to add in a short bio. This field is exceptionally important! Once again, with twitters search function, it pulls information from users’ bios to match them up with keywords entered into the search engine.
This means that you should include keywords that are relevant to your niche market, so that you are able to maximize exposure by being included in search results whenever another twitter user enters in those keywords. Your bio shouldn’t showcase just keywords, however. You also want to ensure that you provide a bit of information about yourself, so that people who aren’t familiar with you can get to know who you are, and consider following you.
Your bio field, just like any twitter broadcast you send out, is also limited to only 140 characters, so you’ll need to take some time to determine the best terms to describe yourself and your business.
Separate keywords with comma’s so that each keyword is individually placed:
Example: Social marketer, writer, online business, speaker
There are other settings that you can configure to suit your preferences, and to help you with the twitter commands and other customization options, I’ve included a ‘Twitter Handbook” in the zip file from this package, so be sure to go through it and make sure that your twitter account is set up and tweaked before going any further.
When you are satisfied with your account, it’s time to write your first tweet! This can make people a little anxious, especially since once you post a tweet, everyone who visits your profile or chooses to follow you will be able to see it.
With twitter, if you ever want to delete a message that you previously sent out, all you have to do is click on the tweet, look for the trash can icon and click it, to delete your message from the time line.
There is also the option to mark specific tweets as favorites, which will make it easy for you to locate that tweet later on, once you have multiple messages in the time line.
When it comes to writing tweets, don’t spend a lot of time worrying about whether it’s creative enough, witty enough, or interesting enough.
Once you have become an active member of the twitter community, you’ll find it easier to think of entertaining and useful tweets, and will also be able to respond to ongoing discussions from those you follow and who follow you.
For now, post whatever’s on your mind. Working on a website? Post about it. Perhaps you’ve found an interesting website or news story, post about it. The idea is to simply post enough so that you become comfortable with the twitter system, and more importantly, so that your profile page shows activity before you start inviting people to follow you.
Once you’ve posted your first tweet, it’s time to start following people on twitter, so that you can build up your twitter presence, and encourage people to follow you in return.
Don’t just sign up and blast out ads every few minutes expecting to achieve anything but annoying those on your list. Take the time to talk to people individually by directing messages to specific people, post useful information or links to free products and resources that people in your various niche markets would appreciate.
Just like anything else you need to develop a reputation on Twitter as being someone who is interested in helping others, while developing your own Twitter presence. A great thing about Twitter is the ability to quickly locate other people who are involved in your target market, or industry.
For example, if you are looking to find people to interview who may be experienced in specific things, you can find many people who are involved in nearly every topic and subject online.
It’s like a rolodex of the entire online business industry, and as Twitter continues to grow, more and more people are jumping on board, so expect to see Twitter evolve and change to improve their system and add more interactive, productive features that will make it even easier for use to reach out to other users.
Posting subtle little updates about your current projects, websites, blogs and products is an easy way to keep people up to date on what you are doing, even people who otherwise might not know who you are, or what you do. The way you present your updates, and the frequency in which you do it, (avoiding Twitter spamming) is critical in staying current and helping your brand become memorable, and noticed by the community.
