Twitter For Marketing

Okay so you should be all set now to use Twitter in the way you REALLY want to use it.  There are thousands of people who are already well aware of how responsive this site can be, and also how much it can help you to build up a steady stream of traffic to your desired website or business.

In this article we are going to cover the most important points when it comes to marketing on Twitter.  There is a right way and a wrong way to do this, and if you go at it in a heavy promotional way, you aren’t going to get the results you want.  I have come across users in the past who have clearly set up lots of separate Twitter accounts and have just one thing to promote.  And strangely enough, they never hang around long enough to learn how to do it properly.

So let’s see what you need to do to make sure you get it right first time.

THE FIRST RULE OF MARKETING

This is the one that confuses a lot of people.  That’s because it is a contradiction in terms.  You see, the first rule of marketing is not to do it all the time!

Now I know what you might be thinking.  You wanted to start using Twitter because you heard about other people who were doing the same thing.  And they were getting more sales, more visitors to their websites, more contacts… the whole caboodle.

Now how on earth are you going to get all that if you aren’t going to do any marketing?

That is where the distinction is.  You ARE going to do some marketing… but you aren’t going to do it all the time.  A good way of understanding how this works is to think about how you like to use the site yourself.  Do you like to go on Twitter to read nothing but marketing messages from other people?  Of course you don’t.  You like to go on the site to find likeminded people that are worth following.  You want to get some benefits from being on there, and you aren’t going to get those benefits if the only people you follow are people who are constantly promoting their own stuff all the time.  If you wanted to read a slew of sales pages you could go straight on the internet to do it.

So when it comes to attracting the attention of other people you need to think along those same lines.  Ask yourself what your followers are looking to get from you.  The answers to this question will come from your reasons for being on the site in the first place.  So if you are a writer and you are looking to link up with other writers (and you have a writing blog you want to get them to visit), you need to think about what they want from you.  Knowledge and advice are two hot favorites, whatever subject you and your followers (and future followers) are interested in.

What you need to do is become known as someone who gives good advice and also offers good links to external websites other than your own.  It’s very much the same as giving away freebies to establish a bond of trust between you and your followers.  If you give them a website address that has nothing to do with you (and isn’t even an affiliate link), and they like it, they will realize that you are someone worth following.  They know you aren’t just trying to sell them stuff all the time.

That means that when you do direct them to your website or blog – generally for a very good reason – they are much more likely to follow that link to see what you have got for them.

Some people only post a tweet when they have updated their blog and have a new post for everyone to read.  But while this doesn’t always mean that the person is trying to sell something, it can lead to apathy on the part of the people who are following that person.  It’s much better to throw in a link to a fresh post on your blog perhaps every four or five tweets, or maybe more.  This isn’t a mathematical formula, but you can see that separating out yourself serving links with others than are purely for the benefit of your followers, is well worth doing.

This more subtle way of marketing is not only more rewarding in the long term, it is also more enjoyable for you.  It will force you to become more engaged with other people on the site – and that is an excellent way to draw people in.