Twitter has quickly become thought of as a huge waste of time on the Internet by many people. Now, it is true that it can easily become a waste of time if all you do is post about what your cat is doing or how cute the guy down the hall is. It is just as much of a waste of time if you, in an attempt to market yourself using all the twitter tools available, only post links to your blogs and websites. This will be looked at as spamming and before you know it, no one will be following you anymore. However, by following a few simple rules you can use a Twitter account as an extremely effective marketing tool in just a short time every day.
1. Use your Twitter profile page to your advantage. When you pick your Twitter account ID, choose something that makes it very clear who you are whether this is a company name, personal name or some type of product branding. Sweetgirl92 does not tell anyone who you are or what you may be posting about. Set up a background for your profile page that gives some details about you and what you do so that people can get to know you quickly.
2. Send a direct message to anyone that follows you thanking them for the follow. It is important to follow anyone that is following you so that you can send and receive direct messages with them. Although it is best to personally write each of these direct messages, this may prove to be too cumbersome when you begin to get a lot of people following you. If you do have to resort to sending automated thank you messages using Twitter tools, do not include any type of promotion in it.
3. Do not over promote! This can not be stressed enough. People will get bored very quickly and stop following you if all you do is send ads to sell something or link to your blog posts. You can, however, get creative. Ask questions or ask for suggestions that can lead into a conversation related to your products or share a useful tip that somehow relates back to your product or service. You can link to news articles that your readers might find interesting about your industry or point out how you offered a solution that helped one of your customers.
4. Have a plan. Try to post consistently to your Twitter account at least two or three times a day with interesting, useful information. Each time that you make these posts, do a quick (quick being the key word here) review of the posts and see if there is anything relevant that you wish to reply to. It is important to reply to people and build a relationship with your followers so that it doesn’t seem like all you’re a doing is throwing your sales pitch out there but it is not necessary to spend hours replying to every single post.
5. Be nice. While it is quite acceptable to offer opinions and answer questions, just remember that you are on the internet and everyone that follows you is reading what you write. Remember the girl that lost her job because of something she posted on her MySpace page. It would be just as easy to post one offensive comment that people take the wrong way and quickly ruin your reputation on Twitter and with your followers. All the time and effort you spent building your followers could go down the drain in 140 characters or less. So, please tweet responsibly.