Using Twitter for Social Media Marketing

By Adam  |  6 Jul 2015 18:00:00

When you think of social media, the odds are that you'll also think of Twitter. Much like many other social media outlets, Twitter is a perfect tool for online marketing and can be used to reach new customers, to stay in touch with old customers and to generally increase your brand awareness. You may be familiar with Twitter, you may even use it regularly, but that doesn't mean you know how to use Twitter for marketing purposes and in this blog post I am going to go over the ways in which Twitter can be used for marketing.

Firstly, however, it's important to go over how exactly you get the ball rolling with Twitter. When you make a new account you have zero followers, how do you get your existing customers to follow you? Well, once you've got an account one of the first things you should do is put a link to it on the homepage of your website. Now whenever anybody comes to your site and likes what they see they can choose to follow you on Twitter so that they don't lose track of you. Equally, having a link to Twitter on your homepage will mean that when old, returning customers next come to your website, they're likely to spot the new addition, think "Oh my, they're on Twitter now" and follow you. You can get some pretty eye-catching social media buttons for you homepage, which a lot of websites make use of, so you should perhaps look into getting something like that. Another thing worth trying is drawing the customers’ attention to your new social media presence through a newsletter (assuming you send out newsletters). Of course, this is more a case of connecting with existing customers in new ways rather than reaching new people, but it's important to keep hold of your existing customers because they could provide you with a steady source of business.

Now that the Twitter is all set up, what do you do next? Well, now comes the actual tweeting, of course! The first and most obvious tweeting strategy is just tweeting about your business and providing links to your website and content. This is all well and good and definitely something you should do, but there's no way you can build up a following only doing this. This approach to Twitter has been often described as "Lots of people screaming in the darkness." The point is that just tweeting your stuff over and over again is unlikely to build up your followers. Having said that, don't be afraid to share the same things more than once; a good number of your followers won't see a lot of your tweets, so sharing things regularly will ensure that everyone sees things.

The good thing about Twitter is its hashtags which are used to help you find new people while also helping people to find you. You should always be sure to try and put as many hashtags as possible on to all tweets you write; for example, if you sell books on your website, you can add '#books' onto the end of each tweet and then anybody who is looking through the 'books' hashtag stands a chance of coming across you and if they're looking through that hashtag, they already have an interest in the product you are supplying. This works in reverse as well; you can search through a certain hashtag and directly interact with people who could be potential customers of your product; this direct interaction will give people a good feeling about the business. If you're sharing other people's work and taking the time to read what people have to say, people will do the same for you in return. They key thing to remember is that it is 'social' media.

Another strategy used by some businesses is to do Twitter promotions. For example "Tweet us what you're up to this weekend and we'll send one of you an official mug!" or something like that. People love to win things, even if the prize isn't that exciting (and especially when it is!) so if you tweet something like that, you're bound to get a lot of attention. People will see their friends (who follow you) entering and then do the same themselves. People who see this are likely to follow you too, because they’ll want to keep an eye on you for future promotions and, hopefully, whoever wins the prize will be so impressed with your product that they become a regular customer. This is a great way to build up excitement for your Twitter feed and your business, though, of course, you can't afford to give things away all the time.

So those are the main things you need to know about Twitter marketing. As it is entirely free, you should sign up and use it to promote your eCommerce business right away