Twitter to Benefit Your Business and Websites
Posted: August 19th, 2008 | Author: GeekGirl | Filed under: Twittering Tweets | 1 Comment »Perhaps you’ve heard about Twitter. We’ve discussed it here quite a bit. Briefly, it’s a social media tool which enables people to post via instant message. Originally designed to help people stay connected it’s quickly becoming a tool used by businesses around the world.
So how do you respond to the question, “What are you doing?” and make it about your business? How do you respond and make it interesting, something your target audience will respond to?
Here are some options to use Twitter to market your business:
Drive traffic to your blog. Post a question on Twitter and include a link to your blog. For example. If you’re a pet trainer or sell pet products you could write a blog post on how to train your dog. Using twitter you could post the following question – “How do you get your dog to stop jumping on visitors?” Follow the question with a link to your blog and then track the traffic to your blog post.
Another way to drive traffic to your blog is to write a twitter post using some of the more interesting or unique comments to blog posts you’ve written. These can start very interesting conversations and drive traffic to your blog and company website.
Announce contests – with a link to your website where the contest details are offered OR post a question and challenge someone to be the first response. Give them something related to your business for answering the question correctly first. Again, using the pet store example, you could give away a pet food bowl or training book.
Share personal adventures which relate to your business. If you’re having a company picnic, share a picture or post a funny or thought provoking quote the CEO just made during a speech. Anything that helps build your brand, company philosophy, and marketing strategy is worthy of posting.
Post interesting or thought provoking statistics, quotes, or headlines and start a conversation. During the conversation, when appropriate, it may be possible to link to your company website.
Make an announcement. Have a new wonderful product or service to share with the world? Use twitter to make an announcement – amplify the power of the announcement and post a code to give the first 5,10, or 50 customers. Make it an event.
Like any social marketing tool the key is to market subtly. No one wants to read an advertisement for your business – however it can still be a valuable marketing tool. Be creative. There are a wide variety of ways to make Twitter more than just a fun social tool, use it to build your business.