How to Use Twitter For Marketing
Learning To Harness This Excellent, New Ancillary Acquisition Tool
Oct 8, 2009
Everyone is atwitter about twitter these days. This highly specific social networking software is rapidly gaining speed on Facebook in the same way that Facebook outpaced MySpace and MySpace grew to be more popular than Friendster. As per Twitter, the software offers "a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What is one doing?"
Perhaps there's no dire need for the world to know what one ate for lunch or what shirt one decided to wear. Likewise, there's no need for customers to know that the company bought a new carpet or is having an office-wide picnic. It is, however, an excellent idea to harness Twitter for marketing efforts.
Twitter Is An Excellent Entry-Point Into A Website
Twitter, in fact, can serve as a stellar entry-point to a website, for both new and existing visitors. It's simple.Post a Tweet, or a message that contains 140 characters or less, and people sign up to follow those posts. Followers can opt to reply with a comment, pass the tweet along to others (retweet), or even post their own tweet that speaks to the original.
Twitter Is Informal And Changeable
The best part about Twitter is that it's informal in nature and is by no means evergreen. There won't have to spend extra time hashing out language or sensibilities like for a company newsletter or copy on a website and certainly not anything like print marketing efforts. Since the web is such a versatile, ephemeral space, one can test, test, test and adjust the approach as many times as is desired with little risk. Results are instant. People will be responding in increasing numbers.
Testing Is Easy
Testing, in fact, is the best way to gauge what tone the content should convey. Of course, calls for action, discounts, and anything being offered is bound to yield a higher response than a plain statement, but only that particular business or person knows what the existing and potential customer base wants.
Drive Traffic To A Site
This software can be used to drive traffic from this off-site location to the company/personal website. It works best to include links to free content or discounted offers or contests rather than a hard sell. Folks don't seem to convert well directly from Twitter followers to paying customers. Twitter, rather acts as an entry point and from there one can mold them into a loyal site visitor and then later, potentially a paying customer.
Keep People Engaged
In addition to using Twitter to directly drive traffic to a site, Twitter can also keep fans/customers/potential customers engaged in a company's business without supplying mundane, unimportant business. For instance, how many would love to know that a favorite magazine or newspaper subscription just hired a new, stellar editor or that reported revenues for that company one own's stock in are now posted for viewing. This type of information- albeit, proprietary, substantive information- is the kind that is perfectly fine to tweet about.
Find New Customers
Posting "insider" or "inner circle" information is a great way to make loyal and potential new customers feel like they are being included in something special and are being kept in the loop. Plus, due to the nature of the software- that is is interactive- Twitter followers will feel like they have a stake in the business itself. This is also an extremely useful- and free- way to glean customer feedback without having to pay for a consultant or an official survey. Customers/users love to feel like they have a say in business decisions and the advice gleaned will help guide marketing efforts and can even end up saving money.
Until the next best social network emerges, take advantage of this free software and drive traffic to the company or personal site!
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