Social Marketing With Twitter
Social marketing involves implementing communication techniques and strategies in order to attract prospective customers to online or offline businesses.
Twitter, happens to be one of these social networking platforms where you can showcase your brand as a business or as an individual simply by posting micro-messages called tweets. These tweets are seen by everyone who follows you and they can respond too. Make sure you keep you tweets simple and understandable as you do not have enough characters to waste. Furthermore, if you are tweeting a link, make sure it is shortened and always add a description.Tweeting links to followers is similar to people distributing flyers without saying what it is all about. For instance, “Just arrived! Check out this guide to Twitter marketing http://blabla…”.
A lot of people want to use twitter to generate traffic, this is cool but what kind of traffic are you aiming for?! Any kind or targeted? Any kind may never get you sales, visitors may not even stay long enough on your website to understand it’s essence. But targeted traffic will surely convert at the end of the day because these are people who already know what they want and you want to show them that you’ve got it.
The technique to sourcing for targeted traffic from twitter is to follow mentors in your niche, then follow their followers.For instance, if your business is about golfing? It’s a smart idea to follow Tiger Woods. Also, endeavour to follow his followers as majority of them are likely interested in golfing. Some of them will definitely follow you back and they will see all of your updates. Try and be nice to them by becoming their friends and then you can market to them. Remember that your products must be valuable or you may loose them as repeat customers.
Using Twitter list is another cool strategy that people are beginning to consider. The essense of this is that , because it’s so hard to keep up with ten/hundreds/thousands of followers Twitter came up with the listing. This makes it easy to group friends according to categories(as you wish though),but the benefit is that friends/followers are easier to locate because you know what group you know what list you grouped them under. Furthermore, there is an option to to keep your list private, I would recommend that you use this for your business associate with whom you are currently working on a new idea or project. You do not want your ideas hijacked suddenly by an opportunist who might be keeping up with your tweets.
Twitter can also be used as a research tool. Tweet a contest, a survey, let people comment and recommend if it’s about a product or service. You’d be grateful afterwards when you find out that just a little adjustment to a particular product or service could sky rocket sales by a very high percentage. Twitter can be used as a feedback tool from the consumer regarding any product or service.