There is no doubt that people listen to these messages and actually become followers. Knowing how to start and maintain a Twitter campaign for your business has proven to be profitable and have lasting effects on the size of your customer base.
Where to Start
First things first: you must create your own website that you will want to direct traffic to. The website can sell your product, provide information about it, or generate sales leads for you.
Once this is done, you will need to determine what your Twitter name will be. It needs to be short and sweet and representative of what your company is trying to do. Usually the business or product name will work, but to ensure things don’t get confusing, make sure that it isn’t already in use on Twitter. You’ll also want to look into the demographic of users on Twitter. Target an audience that will get you the most bang for your buck and focus your efforts to these users. While Twitter followers can be bought, having a fake network that really isn’t interested in your product will lead to limited re-tweets and an overall ineffective campaign
Don’t Be Trigger Happy
While you may be eager and excited about your product, blasting pushy sales messages and up-front tweets can be offensive and brash in this medium. A more subtle approach will get prove more beneficial in this type of community where you are looking more for connections and generation of interest, rather than making outright sales. Even just tweeting about something new and interesting you’ve added to your Flash website will more likely result in someone visiting your website than using flashy sales language about your product. Get a following by being social in the community, following others relevant to your community and even retweeting news and information from other companies that relate to your product.
Embrace the Hash Tag
A technique that has recently gained some notoriety in the marketing community is the use of the hashtag. By entering a pound sign in front of a key phrase, it creates a hashtag. A hashtag is something that can be used to search for all tweets indentified by this tag. For instance, if your business sells high-end speed racing bikes, and your company is called Speedy Bikes you may want to identify all your tweets with the hashtag #speedyracing, #speedybikes or #bikeracing. In this way, anyone can search these tags and get all tweets about you, and you can monitor the propagation of retweets easily.
What to Tweet
As mentioned above, simply sending out abrasive sales ploys will not help increase your sales in a Twitter campaign, but actually do the opposite. You want to gain a following by tweeting helpful tips and information about the field and niche your product is a part of to get people interested in you and following you. Even linking to sites that aren’t your own, but have information relevant to your products will be appreciated.
If they like what you say, they will “re-tweet it” and you will be given the opportunity to reach more friends. If needed, you can include a link to your site in the initial tweets, but again, no outright sales ploys should be used. After a while, directing someone to your page to look at something new or a deal that is being offered will be taken as more of a friendly piece of information than a pushy attempt. Businesses have used twitter to run contests, offer coupon codes and to advise people of events pertaining to their business.
Simple Hints
Keeping up with all these tweets sounds exhausting, but there is plenty of help out there. You can hire people to create effective tweets and manage your whole campaign. There are sites that allow you to upload all your tweets to, and will then tweet them for you on a timed schedule. Tweeting in the morning seems to work well for other companies. Just remember to keep your Tweets to 140 characters or less.
