Twitter Marketing: The Number One Rule

If you’ve started using Twitter as a marketing tool for your business, personal brand or affiliate products, you’ve likely had some successes and some failures. Twitter is loaded with marketers and the line is very clear. The line between those who “get it” and those who don’t. Those who don’t get it are likely to labor in obscurity, while those who do will find Twitter to be an extremely powerful marketing tool. But how do you make sure that you’re on the right side of the Twitter line?

It’s simple. To avoid being ostracized on Twitter, to be included as a valued and trusted part of the community, there is one rule. For every time you talk about yourself, talk about someone else. That may seem counterintuitive. After all, you’re on Twitter to talk about your brand, your products and your offerings. Why would you want to talk about your Twitter followers instead of yourself? It’s because Twitter is a conversation, not a commercial. The point of any kind of marketing is to interest potential consumers and clients, and Twitter is no different in that regard. What is different is the way interest is generated on Twitter. To get your followers interested in what you have to say and sell, you have to play by Twitter’s rules. Self-interested tweet after self-interested tweet will get you nowhere except labeled as a spammer.

By engaging with your Twitter followers and tweeting about them, for them, or answering their questions, you slip right in to the flow of Twitter. Being seen as a valuable contributor and participating in the Twitter community, you humanize and personalize your business or brand. The personal face and engagement of social media marketing is what makes it such an effective strategy, creating mini-evangelists of sorts out of your Twitter followers. By indicating that you are willing to give as well as receive, your presence on Twitter won’t be seen simply as a marketing ploy, and become all the more effective for it. Following the “one for you, one for them” rule with what you choose to broadcast on Twitter shows that your brand or company grasps the whole Twitter concept, allowing for seamless integration of Twitter into your overall social media marketing strategies.

Social Marketing with Twitter: Monitoring Your Brand

Social media marketing strategies that include Twitter do not stop at simply broadcasting your message and engaging in conversation with your Twitter followers. It is also important that you keep track of what is being said about you and your brand on Twitter, in order to keep abreast of your reputation and the needs and interests of those you are marketing to. There are several tools available for keeping track of what is being said around Twitter about you, your brand and your products.

Twitter Search. Twitter search is now integrated into the main web interface of the Twitter service. When using Twitter for social marketing, make a habit of running a search on keywords, terms and product names several times per day. Use this information to respond quickly to questions and concerns, keep track of what people are saying and engage in productive conversation with others in the field or potential customers. Be sure not to limit yourself solely to terms related to your products. Also expand your search to related terms to look for openings where your products could solve a need or problem or be marketed to a new demographic.

Hashtags. Hashtags are a tool created by Twitter early adopters used to keep track of conversations and topics. Though they are used for many purposes, hashtags provide an especial help to those establishing a social media marketing strategy on Twitter. Early on, make a habit of using related hashtags in your tweets, and establish tags associated with your products. Using Hashtags.org will help you located relevant tags, and making a point of creating your own tags will encourage your followers to use them when speaking of your products.

Tweetgrid. Tweetgrid is a Twitter tool that will allow you to combine the two tips above. Brand monitoring is essential for an effective social media marketing strategy. Tweetgrid will allow you to create several standard searches that you find yourself repeating on a day to day basis. Arranging several different searches in a grid, this Twitter tool continuously updates Twitter search results throughout the day. Rather than repeating the same searches for terms and hashtags over and over, Tweetgrid will allow you to continually monitor your brand reputation, customer concerns and the effectiveness of your social media marketing strategy.

Copyright © 2011 Jackie Cuyvers