For quite a few years, social media networks are all the rage and many businesspeople have been quite active in them. Twitter is one of the more popular platforms and it’s easy to send out tweet after tweet. If we have large enough followers, we can update them regularly to inform them about new updates. As an example, restaurant owners can tweet about today’s specials and other interesting deals. Many marketers have argued that Twitter should be used effectively as a mainstream marketing tool. Twitter should be appreciated for its potential active role and it is the time for small businesses to pull away from traditional Yellow page-like marketing methods. Twitter is incredibly easy to use. It is generally used to update status, share web links, send photos and broadcast other messages. This is a way to deliver snappy and quick messages to our faithful followers. It is also a non-intrusive marketing method, because people choose to follow us and read our messages.
Permission-based marketing should be considered as the de-facto standard and it needs to effectively replace our intrusive marketing methods, such as email marketing that can become somewhat spammy if we neglect some basic rules. It can be rather challenging initially to build a group of followers with Twitter, but there are some marketing agencies and consultants that can provide us with start-up methods to begin a Twitter-based presence. Unlike Facebook, Twitter is designed for brief messages and users can only send short 140-character (not word) messages. They should be enough if we have something brief to say and we want to announce a product. However, it is easy to encourage people to read brief messages, especially if we can pack them with enough information. Twitter is also very versatile, because there are official apps for popular mobile platforms, such as Android and iPhone to allow us send and read tweets, wherever we are.
Twitter will automatically send our short messages to followers using its internal systems. Twitter is a robust system that can reach millions each day if we have enough time to develop interesting content. Establishing Twitter community around our business takes careful consideration and planning. New business owners should also be aware that like other social network platforms, Twitter is incredibly noise and they should be able to dismiss irrelevant messages.
There are a number of tools we can use to improve Twitter effectiveness. Twitterfeed is a useful online solution that can transform our blog posts and RSS feeds into Twitter tweets for broadcasts to our followers. We should use this tool if we have a blog and we regularly publish new posts. Tweetlater is a nifty application for any busy entrepreneurs and business owners. It is possible to leverage our online business solutions by scheduling our tweets. We could prepare some tweets and send them out later on specific schedules with Tweetlater. Tweetbeep is a useful solution to monitor the platform for specific keywords and it works with shortened URLs. This allows us to track competitors’ tweets and check other updates in the market.