How to use twitter for marketing

Twitter today has more than 6 million registered users and daily around 55 million unique visitors and more than 1 billion tweets are posted. It is used by individual, celebrities (Barack Obama, Shaquille O’Neal and etc), companies (Dell, Zappos and etc). Now question, Twitter is a serious platform for publishers to monitor?

The reality is that Twitter is already starting to have a business impact. Dell sold more than $1 million in products via twitter, while companies like Comcast to Zappos have found twitter a compelling way to provide customer support and improve their corporate reputations. Twitter impact for marketing is smaller than Google programs however its result is better than FaceBook.

Twitter is a tool for “micro-blogging” or posting very short updates, comments or thoughts. In fact, since twitter was designed to be very compatible with mobile phones through text messages. Each update is limited to 140 characters. Truly, it is a micro-blog. We can define twitter in another way, twitter is like a cross between instant messaging (IM) and a chat room, as it is open forum, however there is restriction to send message or read message those are connected to you.

How to use twitter for marketing

1- Engage yourself in social media:

As everyone knows social media is great way to have a conversation with market and find prospects for your business. However being CEO or executive of company especially larger or global company, it’s really hard to do blogging or answer of messages, find request on face book, building network and etc. But twitter is designed in a way that busy people i.e. CEO or founder who always on road meeting with people, can place their interesting comments / opinions as tweet on their market.

2- Keep in touch with blogger / media
Twitter is easiest way to follow influential people in the media, blogging and etc. You can see how often they update their blogs and what they are doing and what their new plan.

3- Brand/Company Monitoring:
Now a day most of companies are using twitter to improve their brand using feedback from their followers.

4- Special Announcements:
Deals & Sales, Most of companies like Dell, using twitter to announce their new sell and deals. They are getting really good response from twitter.

5- Live updates on events or conferences:
Companies, bloggers, singers and other organization using twitter to give live updates about their upcoming events and conferences.

6- Promoting blog articles:
webinars, interesting news and more, Its really easy to post a link on something in twitter, mostly blogger post their new post, news and webinars on twitter.

Step by Step Guideline for using Twitter:

1- Signup and post your profile, in signing up important aspect to make your twitter for your brand either it will be company branding or personal branding.

2- Write some update, once you are on twitter, post your updates using 140 golden words. Post your blog latest post written by you or if you like others online, mention an interesting thought you had, or tell what you are doing right now, just write something. Here if you plan to use some link then you TINYURL, HOOTSUITE or anyother site which give you tiny URL. It will save your space of 140 words.

3. Invite Friends, before browsing friends over twitter, invite your friends those are registered with you over YAHOO, GMAIL or another email account. You can do it using twitter find friends -> invite by email. Now you start finding friend over twitter there is multiple ways either you follow your friend and in his/her profile available follower start following them. Other option to search your interest, keywords through search.twitter.com and follow these users.

4. How to “Chat”, Using the @ symbol before someone’s twitter username is how people have “conversations” in twitter. This makes their username a link to their profile so other people can follow the conversation (sort of) in short; its public broadcast IM service.

5. Monitoring
• Monitoring conversation: you can monitor, conversation / discussion about any user, company either you join or not using @username through search
• Monitor event/conference: As per twitter standards # is used for event or conference so it’s easy to monitor your company or others event.
• you can search anything or your interesting keywords

6. Monitor you URL in tweet: If you are posting tweet with URL you must like to see how many followers click it. There are different tools available those provide two features one to convert your URL into tiny and also helpful to track your click like hootsuite.com.