Effective Twitter Marketing for Small Business

There is no question that using Twitter allows small businesses to access thousands, if not millions, of potential customers who may have previously been out of reach, and is an increasingly essential tool in any social media strategy.  But there are pitfalls to using this micro-blogging tool.  Recently, the Econsultancy blog questioned whether Twitter was of any use at all for businesses, and inquired further whether giveaways attracted customers or just made the lucky recipients happier with the companies in question.

For smaller businesses, giveaways and Twitter-exclusive promotions are especially effective, because they can place the product directly in front of the consumer.  They can increase followers and attract wider attention to the feed, particularly through retweets.  Not everyone pays attention to each individual tweet, but those who are interested in the product will be sure to take note of it.  A company like JetBlue is already widely known and people who are travelling to their destinations may take note and use them in the future.  For a smaller product, such as a book, a Twitter marketing campaign can raise awareness by researching appropriate followers, tweeting reviews and website promotions, and giving away a few copies.  People who may never have seen that title before have now been exposed to it, and no one will buy a product they haven’t seen before.

There is also a point to including a human touch with your company’s twitter feed, rather than an automatic feed.  Joining in conversations relevant to your products, or even those chats that just interest the person behind the twitter feed, can also increase an account’s followers and engage them enough to follow your feed.  Many users are not interested in accounts that simply spam them with ads or information irrelevant to their lives, so the knowledge that they can engage with a person makes them more likely to read tweets from your account.  Twitter is a conversation, and joining in on that conversation can only benefit you.  Furthermore, users who interact with you are the followers that every company wants.  It is far more useful to have a few hundred engaged followers than several thousand “junk” followers who never sign on Twitter and therefore rarely follow links.

Programs have even been designed to help you use Twitter as effectively as possible.  Some programs will allow you to determine your least popular Twitter strategies, as they can display when a user has stopped following you and after which tweet.  Of course, people do regularly unfollow users for no reason at all, but trends can be ascertained and acted upon.  Twitter and Facebook can be integrated, allowing the busy social media employee to skip a step by placing news on both platforms, and programs like TweetDeck can help you monitor which tweets are published to Facebook and which stay on Twitter.

Twitter may be less relevant for businesses that can rely on large brick and mortar presences and real life visual advertising, but for those who primarily market online, it’s an important component.  It allows every business to keep in direct touch with customers and deal with problems as they come up.  These are only a few strategies, but they can help you begin to navigate the busy minefield of micro-blogging.