How To Use Twitter As A Marketing Tool

Twitter is one of the social media.  It is pretty much a blog combined with a chat room, so basically it allows you a platform to get your ideas out before a group of people in real time.

Before we get into the meat of my article, I want so share something amusing that happened as I was writing it: As I was dictating the title of my article, my dictation software spat out this sentence instead: "how to use torture as a marketing tool"

Back on topic: It might be helpful to briefly discuss how Twitter works: It is sort of like a walkie talkie in that only people who have switched on to your channel (by following you) can receive your messages. In the same way, you will only receive messages from those people whose channel you have switched on (by following them.)

So, the first order of business, after you join, is to start adding people to your followers list.  You will then be switched into their channel and be able to receive their messages.

Who should you follow? Anyone who is interested in your niche. So if you are promoting a make money offer, you should follow people who are interested in making money. If you are promoting a dog training book or technique, then people interested in dogs would be appropriate. Use the "find people" tool at the top right of your screen when you are logged into your Twitter account and type in keywords related to your niche. You will then pull up a list of Twitter accounts tagged with those keywords. Pick one or two accounts as a "base" account out of that list and start following people who are following that account.

I should insert a word of caution here: Twitter does have a follower limit: you may follow no more than 2000 at a time until 2000 or more people are following you. After that point, you may follow an additional number of people no greater than 110% of the number of people following you.  Accordingly, you should be careful about whom you follow. Don't feel the need to follow someone just because they're following you. You want followers who will actually read your tweets, and are not just following you
to increase their follower count.

Once people start following you, you will be able to send them messages. What should you "tweet" about? Well there's no hard and fast rule here, other than you should always aim to send no more than one promotional message for every three messages that you send out. The reason for this is that you want to give your followers a reason to keep following you, and constant promotional messages (like one after the other, all day long) is probably the fastest way to get "unfollowed" really quickly.

If used judiciously, Twitter can be a great marketing resource. You can use it to build a list of followers highly interested in what you have to say. That, in Internet marketing terms, is like having money in the bank.