Top 7 Twitter Marketing Tips For Businesses

Although there are numerous lists of the top 5 to 31 marketing tips for Twitter users and businesses, I decided that it would be a much more effective to break these lists down to the top 7 Twitter marketing tips and social media marketing management services for businesses who are either new or fairly well accustomed to using the service.

1. Twitter Is Not Purely For Marketing and Selling Business Products and Services
Although Twitter is often perceived and utilized as a purely marketing and social selling tool, Twitter’s original intention and most effective use still remains as a social networking tool to share useful, interesting information and news with people globally in 140 characters or less. Moreover, as Sonja Jefferson asserts in one of her latest articles Twenty Top Twitter Tips, this entails that Twitter promotion and selling should be only practiced occasionally and interspersed with other useful target customer content, such as useful links and information for your businesses’ Twitter followers.

In particular not to single any one industry or individual out, but I have noticed that music producers, and urban music producers in particular, such as 5 Star Beats are notorious for only using their Twitter account for promoting their production services. And although this may be a successful technique for some Hip-Hop producers, such as @5StarBeats4Sale to increase traffic and sales on his official website. For instance, 5 Star Beatz has about 5.5 million views on his website in the past 3 and half or so years, since the site was launched in November of 2011, I strongly would advise most businesses or entrepreneurs against only posting promotional tweets for their business, as you could lose or turn off a lot of Twitter followers who could have become potential loyal customers for your business.

2. Business CEO’s And Employees Should Avoid Posting Controversial Or Potentially Offensive Content To Their Company Twitter Account
Hopefully the unfortunate Twitter incidents of Justine Sacco and former U.S. Congressman Anthony Weiner will have taught business CEO’s and employees whose job is to manage and update the company’s Twitter profile to think a little bit more prior to Tweeting completely inappropriate and highly offense Twitter messages and pictures while they are either intoxicated or completely sober. And especially if you are constantly in the public eye, it is highly recommended that you avoid posting any highly career damaging and offensive Twitter messages to your companies Twitter account.

3. Establish Yourself As A Thought Leader In Your Industry
In order to obtain a significant amount of loyal followers, fans and customers who are engaged you will have to establish yourself as a though leader in your specific market niche or industry. And one way to do this is to post highly authentic and informative content to your Twitter account that is catered towards your target audience, such as blog articles related to the services or products you are selling; how-to videos or articles and inspirational quotes or tips related to the products or services, which you are offering. For instance, under30ceo.com is a website that markets and produces high quality news, tips and events information for young entrepreneurs under the age of 30. And in particular does an extremely great job of producing and sharing high quality news and blog articles related to start-up businesses and entrepreneurs on their Twitter account (see below image for proof).

4. Network With Top Industry Influencers And Brands
As founder and CEO of Problemio.com, Alex Genadinik (2013) points out in one of his latest YouTube internet marketing tutorial videos, entitled Twitter Marketing Tutorial With Strategies, Tips and Ideas, another excellent way of obtaining and retaining a strong Twitter following is to try and network with the top influential people in your market niche or industry on Twitter via retweeting and replying to their tweets; sharing their blog articles and contacting them directly on Twitter. And once you have established significant relationships with top industry influencers and brands you can leverage these relationships to cross promote your products and gain a more widespread Twitter following, and in turn, hopefully gain more customers and increased sales.

5. Update And Engage With Your Twitter Followers On A Consistent Basis
As Jefferson asserts in one of her latest internet marketing articles Twenty Top Twitter Tips, in order to obtain and retain a significant Twitter following, it is absolutely crucial to update your Twitter profile on a consistent basis (i.e. every few days or so depending on what type of business you are running and how much content or services you are trying to sell). And this includes updating your company logo, and posting high quality and relevant content on a consistent basis.

6. Build Excitement
As Diane Molina points out in one of her articles entitled Four Tips For Marketing On Twitter From @CharityWater on the twitter.com advertising blog, it is extremely important for companies to build excitement about their latest product/service or event launches via Twitter, which should include relevant hashtags and pictures or short links to promotional videos. For instance, Molina mentions Non-Profit organization Charity Water’s World Water Day (March 22, 2013) paid Twitter campaign, which was extremely successful and led them to generating the most traffic on their website.

7. Top Recommended Social Media Management Tools For Twitter
Some of my favourite social media management tools for monitoring, automating posts, link-shortening and providing social media analytics reports in an efficient and effective manner, include: Hootsuite, the Buffer App Tool, Twitonomy and Twtrland. However, there are several other social media management and analytics tools available on the internet, which you can check out, including: Tweepi, Tweetadder and TweetDeck, which is owned by Twitter and is only currently available on Windows and Mac-based desktop devices.

Clearly Twitter is going to continue to play an increasingly significant role in the world of social media marketing and advertising for businesses in the next few years, with well over 200 million active registered users and over 400 million tweets per day, as of September 2013. Not to mention the increasing popularity of Twitter advertising services, such as promoted tweets. However, the global IT sector is a very competitive and fickle realm, which can change at about the same pace as the technology it is built on, and technology companies, such as Twitter’s fortunes are based on a complex and interconnected web of factors, which is often extremely hard to predict very far ahead of time.